As cliché as it sounds: it depends.
Your industry, your competition, and your starting point all play a role — but “long-term” doesn’t mean nothing should happen for months.
Like in most SEO campaigns we’ve worked on, you should start seeing clear signs of progress within the first 8–12 weeks. That doesn’t necessarily mean ranking on page one yet, but you should at least notice impressions trending upward in Google Search Console.
This usually indicates that Google is crawling your website properly, your key pages are being indexed, and your site is starting to appear in search results even if it’s still on page five or six.
If impressions remain flat after a couple of months, it’s usually worth reviewing the fundamentals — including your keyword targeting, key landing page optimisation, and indexing.
In our experience, indexing issues are more common than people think. We’ve come across well-written, fully optimised pages that generated zero visibility simply because they were never indexed — meaning they had no chance of appearing in search results in the first place.
After the first few months, the goal shifts from simply getting indexed and noticed to steadily climbing the rankings.
SEO isn’t instant — but it also shouldn’t feel like nothing is happening. Done properly, you should see early signs of traction before major results kick in.