Like a good wine or a wise-man, proper SEO takes time to achieve fruition. One of the most challenging things I have had to accept as a professional SEO is the time it can take to see the fruit of my hard labour. And over at SEOMoz.org they hit this nail squarely on the head.
The engines need time to re-crawl your site. For a lucky few, this might take only days or a couple weeks, but for many large sites and even for smaller sites that aren’t terrificly high on Google’s “must crawl” list, we’ve seen as much as 3-4 months pass before a site’s pages are fully updated. The engines have to crawl all your link partners, too! If you’ve recently launched some great widgets or viral material or a new content licensing system, it’s going to be a solid wait before you experience the full impact of that work. The algorithms reward patience. Even if the engines start to see those links right away, it might be a few weeks or months before the algorithm rewards the full weight and heft of their existence. Why? Because search engines learned years ago that manipulative link building is often temporary, while high quality links stand the test of time. This issue is particularly true of new domains (or newly moved domains), so be aware that you might have to earn some trust over time before you feel all the positive ranking impacts of links. It takes time to attract links. Last, but not least, on our list of reasons is the growth of links themselves. If you’ve just started new content, design and promotion strategies to attract links, you not only need time for those campaigns to reach their targets, you need to wait for the links to start rolling in (and then get counted by the engines). This can be a long, tough slog, and understandably, a lot of site owners and SEOs give up without ever getting the full benefit of their work.
Convincing a client that SEO results take time and that time can vary from a 2 or 3 months to as long as 4-6 months is tough but if done properly SEO results can be well worth the wait!