How long does SEO actually take?

The rough sequence

1. Indexing — days to weeks. Search engines find and store your pages.
2. Early visibility — weeks to a few months, usually on low-competition, specific phrases.
3. Competitive positions — many months of sustained work.
4. Steady enquiries — the point of it, and the slowest part.

What changes the timeline

• How competitive your market is
• Whether your site has any existing history
• How much genuinely useful content gets produced
• Whether technical problems are in the way

What to watch early

Before rankings move, look for pages being indexed, impressions appearing for relevant phrases, and the first enquiries mentioning something they read on the site.