DEV Community: Tanguy De Keyzer

How Long Does SEO Actually Take? Stop Expecting a Different Answer.

Tanguy De Keyzer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:25:44 +0000

Everyone wants a clean number. I get it. A client once asked me, dead serious, whether we could get them to page one of Google in "three, maybe four weeks." Their competitor had been publishing content for two years. So let me give you the honest answer upfront, even if it's not the one you were hoping for.

SEO takes three to six months to show meaningful results. In competitive markets, plan for six to twelve.

That's the consensus, that's the data, and no amount of wishful thinking changes it. What does change is how far along you are in those six months at the end of it.

The uncomfortable truth about SEO timelines

Here's what most posts about "hoelang duurt SEO" won't tell you: the timeline question is actually the wrong question. What you should be asking is what kind of results, and starting from what baseline?

SEO typically takes three to six months to produce measurable results, and in competitive industries it can take six to twelve months to see significant ranking and revenue impact. The timeline depends on the age and authority of the website, how quickly changes are implemented, and how long search engines take to crawl and reassess updated pages.

So a site that launched three months ago, has zero backlinks, and operates in financial services? That's a different equation than a five-year-old domain in a niche market that just needs some content cleanup.

The typical top-10 ranking page is around two years old, and pages ranking at number one are almost three years old on average. That stat always lands awkwardly in client meetings. But it's not a reason to give up. It's a reason to start now rather than later.

What's actually happening inside those first months

Month one is not about ranking. Full stop. It's about fixing the foundation: crawl errors, site speed, indexing issues, metadata, internal linking. None of that moves your rankings directly. All of it determines whether anything else you do will work.

Technical fixes or on-page optimizations can generate early gains within weeks, but sustainable growth in organic traffic is a cumulative process that builds over time.

By month three or four, things start to shift. Rankings start moving, but don't expect stability yet. Google often deliberately shifts pages up and down after big changes to test how they perform for searchers. This "trial period" can last 60 to 90 days, and rankings might dip before they improve.

This is the part where a lot of companies panic and start making changes. That's usually the worst thing you can do.

By month six, you're either seeing compounding returns or you've identified what isn't working. Either outcome is useful.

The five factors that actually control your timeline

Forget generic advice for a second. These are the real levers:

Domain age and authority. New websites usually take longer to gain traction because they have less authority, fewer backlinks, and limited historical trust signals. More established websites can sometimes grow faster because they already have indexed pages, some domain strength, and a content base to build on.

Competition in your niche. A Belgian B2B software company targeting a specific vertical will get results faster than a generalist agency fighting for "digital marketing Brussels." In highly competitive industries, it may take longer to achieve significant rankings due to the number of established players.

Technical health. Sites with clean architecture, fast load times, proper indexing, and no crawl errors move faster than sites buried in technical debt. If your site has thousands of broken links, duplicate content issues, or failing Core Web Vitals, the first weeks of an SEO engagement will be spent fixing foundational problems before any growth work can begin. Technical fixes are necessary work, but they extend the timeline to visible results.

Content quality and frequency. According to First Page Sage's 2025 Google algorithm research, the number one factor in Google's algorithm remains consistent publication of satisfying content. Google continues to reward consistent producers of helpful information, giving these websites quicker indexing and higher rankings. And interestingly, freshness has vaulted up the rankings as a signal: website pages that update at least once per year gain an average of 4.6 positions in the SERPs versus pages that haven't been updated.

How fast your team can implement changes. This one is chronically underrated. SEO results also depend on how quickly teams, such as developers, can implement changes requested by the SEO team. Updates that take weeks or months to complete will naturally slow results. This is often a significant factor when SEO is competing for finite resources within large companies.

The thing nobody wants to admit about "quick SEO wins"

Don't fall prey to dubious claims or unrealistic promises, like topping the rankings of a competitive keyword in under a month. Shortcuts may provide short-term results but ultimately do more damage than good to your website's ranking.

I've seen this play out more times than I'd like. A company hires a cheap SEO vendor who promises fast results, builds a load of low-quality backlinks, gets a short-term bump, then tanks after a Google core update. Getting back from a manual action penalty is a much slower process than just doing it right from the start.

Search Engine Land's research frames it clearly: SEO timeline promises are often extremes, guaranteed results in 30-day or six-month plans that never deliver growth. The truth sits somewhere in the middle, results take somewhere between three and six months.

So what should you actually track while you wait?

Rankings aren't the only signal that SEO is working. In the first three months, watch:

Indexing rate: are your new pages showing up in Google Search Console?
Impressions: are you appearing in more searches, even if you're not clicking yet?
Crawl activity: is Googlebot visiting your site regularly?

These are leading indicators. Revenue and qualified leads are lagging indicators. There's a difference between activity and outcomes. Activity is rankings moving, impressions increasing, and organic traffic growing. Outcomes are leads and revenue. Activity starts in the first 30 days. Outcomes take longer because they depend on traffic reaching a volume where conversion data becomes meaningful.

The companies that pull the plug after two months because "it's not working" are the ones who never find out what would have happened at month seven.

One practical shortcut that actually works

If you want to compress the timeline without compromising anything, go narrow before you go broad. Target long-tail keywords with clear intent before chasing the high-volume head terms. A page ranking in position 4 for a specific, buying-intent query will bring in more actual leads than a page on page 3 for a broad keyword.

A local bakery may find it easier to rank for "best bakery in [city]" than a national e-commerce site competing for "shoes." In practice, targeting long-tail and lower-competition keywords often produces earlier wins while broader commercial terms take longer to rank.

Build topical authority in a contained cluster first, then expand. It's less exciting to pitch in a strategy meeting, but it's why some sites see movement in four months while others are still waiting at month ten.

If you're trying to figure out where your site actually stands and what a realistic SEO timeline looks like for your specific situation, that starts with an honest audit. Our team at Customer Impact builds SEO strategies that fit your timeline around what you've already got, not a generic template. Worth a conversation if you're tired of vague answers.

Your SEO Checker Isn't Lying to You. You're Just Asking It the Wrong Questions.

Tanguy De Keyzer — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:14:49 +0000

Every week someone sends me a screenshot of a free SEO checker, points to a red warning light, and says their website is broken. Usually it isn't. But sometimes the score is green and the site gets zero leads from search. Both situations happen constantly, and they both stem from the same misunderstanding: a score is not a strategy.

So let's kill a few myths, because SEO checking is genuinely useful when you understand what you're actually looking at.

Myth 1: A high SEO score means your site ranks well

Free SEO checkers (Ubersuggest, Seobility, Neil Patel's analyzer, take your pick) measure what they can see in under ten seconds. They check for a meta description, an H1, image alt text, whether your page loads in under three seconds on a fiber connection. Important stuff, but incomplete.

A page can pass every single on-page check and still rank on page four, because the checker has no idea whether you have any backlinks, whether your content actually answers what people are searching for, or whether Google has indexed you correctly in the first place.

The real SEO checking starts in Google Search Console, which is free, directly connected to Google's index, and tells you things no third-party tool can: which queries are bringing impressions, which pages have indexing errors, and what your actual click-through rate looks like on specific keywords. I had a client once whose checker showed a 91/100 score. Search Console showed 47 pages with "crawled but not indexed." That's the kind of thing a score doesn't surface.

Myth 2: SEO is dead (or dying because of AI)

Every year this narrative comes back. Every year the data says otherwise.

A comprehensive study analyzing over 40,000 of the largest websites in the United States found that organic search traffic declined by only 2.5% year-over-year in 2025, not the 25% to 60% drops frequently cited in industry commentary. The analysis was conducted by Graphite in partnership with Similarweb and examined traffic patterns across multiple industries, site sizes, and categories.

That's not a collapse. That's noise. And it doesn't change what's happening underneath: a thought leadership SEO campaign that invests in regular, strategic content creation can deliver a 748% ROI, and B2B companies generate 2x more revenue from organic search than any other channel.

The landscape is shifting, yes. SEO is fragmenting. There are more SERP features, more AI-driven answers, and more competition for fewer clicks on informational queries. Strategy now matters more than ever. That's not an argument against doing SEO. It's an argument for doing it properly.

Myth 3: Checking your SEO website once is enough

This is where I see the most damage. A business pays an agency for an SEO audit, gets a 40-page PDF, implements half the recommendations, and then considers the job done. Eighteen months later they wonder why rankings dropped after a Google algorithm update they didn't know about.

SEO checking isn't an event. It's closer to monitoring a production server. You need to know when something breaks, not three quarters later.

There is no need to check Search Console every day. If new issues are found by Google on your site, you'll receive an email alert. But you should check your account roughly once a month, or when you make changes to the site's content, to make sure the data is stable.

Monthly is the floor, not the ceiling. If you publish frequently, check more often. Indexing problems, Core Web Vitals regressions, and sudden drops in impressions all show up in Search Console before they show up in your traffic numbers.

A minimal check seo routine looks something like this:

Monthly SEO check
-----------------
1. Search Console > Coverage report: any new indexing errors?
2. Search Console > Performance: impressions/clicks down >15% vs last period?
3. Core Web Vitals report: any URLs flipped to "Poor"?
4. Manual Actions report: clean? (If not, fix before anything else.)
5. Run one crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb: broken links, missing titles, redirect chains.

That takes about 45 minutes if your site isn't on fire. If it is on fire, you'll be glad you checked.

Myth 4: Technical SEO and content SEO are separate jobs

They aren't. A beautifully written page that Google can't crawl is invisible. A perfectly crawlable page with thin content ranks for nothing. Both sides of the equation have to work.

Almost every top-ranking page includes its target keyword in the title and first heading. Backlinko found that nearly 100% of page-one results use their keyword in the title or H1, making it a non-negotiable ranking signal. That's a technical implementation of a content decision. The two are inseparable.

On the backlink side, the picture is similar. Websites with an active blog earn 97% more inbound links on average than those without fresh content. Articles with over 2,000 words generate 77% more backlinks than shorter ones, and also tend to rank for more long-tail keywords. You can't buy your way to authority without content that earns it.

What "check your SEO" actually means in practice

When I say check seo, I mean a layered process:

Layer 1: Crawlability. Can Google actually reach and index your pages? Check robots.txt, XML sitemap, and the Index Coverage report. This is the foundation. If this layer is broken, nothing else matters.

Layer 2: On-page signals. Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal linking. Yes, run a free SEO checker here. It's useful for catching obvious gaps at scale, especially on large sites where someone inevitably publishes a page with a duplicate title.

Layer 3: Performance signals. Core Web Vitals, page speed on mobile, HTTPS. Google's own Search Central documentation is the most reliable reference for what actually matters here, and it's updated when the algorithm changes, which means it ages better than any blog post including this one.

Layer 4: Authority signals. Backlink profile, E-E-A-T, brand mentions. This is the hardest layer to fake and the most durable once you build it. It's also the layer that free SEO checkers completely ignore.

Most businesses I talk to are decent at layers one and two, weak on three, and have almost never thought seriously about four.

The part where I admit the honest complexity

None of this is simple, which is why so many businesses outsource it and why so many outsourcing relationships fail. A good SEO partner should be able to explain what they're checking, why it matters, and what changed since last month. If the answer is a recycled PDF and a ranking report with no context, that's not SEO, that's paperwork.

If you want to understand what a real SEO website audit covers, and what ongoing SEO looks like in practice for a Belgian business, how we approach SEO for Belgian businesses gives a clearer picture of what the work actually involves.

The short version: the most valuable thing you can do right now is open Search Console, look at your Coverage report, and fix whatever is flagged there. That's free, it's first-party data, and it will do more for your rankings than any score from any checker.

I Spent a Year Calling It Marketing. It Was Never Growth Marketing.

Tanguy De Keyzer — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:51:43 +0000

I Spent a Year Calling It Marketing. It Was Never Growth Marketing.

TL;DR: Growth marketing is not a fancier word for marketing. It focuses on the entire customer journey, uses continuous data-driven experiments, and optimizes for retention and revenue, not just awareness. If your campaigns end the moment someone clicks "buy," you are not doing growth marketing.

There is a specific kind of embarrassing that only hits you in a client presentation. Q3 last year, I am sitting across from a SaaS founder in Ghent, walking her through our campaign results. Click-through rates, impressions, some nice top-of-funnel numbers. She nods politely, then says: "But where did those leads actually go?"

I did not have a good answer.

We had done what most marketing teams do: built awareness, drove traffic, handed the leads to sales, and then... stopped looking. The campaign was technically successful. The revenue growth was underwhelming. That conversation is what finally pushed me to understand what growth marketing actually means, versus what most of us were doing.

So, what is growth marketing?

Traditional marketing efforts focus on creating brand awareness and making more sales. Growth marketing, in contrast, focuses on growing as quickly as possible by understanding what customers want, delivering it to them, and finding ways to keep them engaged and satisfied.

Simpler version: traditional marketing stops at the sale. Growth marketing does not.

Traditional marketing focuses on finding leads and turning them into sales. After that initial sale, retaining the customer can belong to a different team entirely. Growth marketing follows the customer at each stage of their journey, focusing on keeping them coming back and engaging in a relationship with the brand.

That is the structural difference. And it matters enormously for what you actually build, measure, and optimize.

The AARRR framework (no, not a pirate thing)

If you want to understand growth in marketing, the AARRR model is the clearest mental map available. Growth marketing operates on the AARRR framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral), and this framework ensures every marketing initiative connects to measurable business outcomes.

Acquisition   → How do people find you?
Activation    → Do they get value fast enough to stick around?
Retention     → Do they come back?
Revenue       → Are you optimizing what they pay?
Referral      → Are happy customers bringing others?

Most marketing teams are only playing in the "Acquisition" row. A growth marketeer works all five rows, simultaneously, with data.

In a growth marketing strategy, companies add layers to their marketing campaigns, using A/B testing, cross-channel strategies, and innovative technology to unlock greater benefits. The key word is "layers." You are not replacing what works. You are making it measurable and then improving it obsessively.

Why experiments, not campaigns

The biggest mindset shift when moving from conventional marketing toward growth is the relationship with failure.

Traditional campaigns are big, slow, and expensive. You brief an agency in January, go live in March, and check results in June. By then the market has shifted and your budget is spent. A growth marketer can test two email subject lines, instantly view which version drives more conversions, and adjust the campaign accordingly. A traditional marketer might wait months for performance data.

A growth marketeer runs small experiments constantly. These typically run from a minimum of one week to a maximum of one month, after which marketers analyze the results to determine which tests resulted in the most conversions. From there, they can decide to further build upon the experiment, pivot their methods, or dispose of it altogether.

Failure is not a disaster. It is a data point. That reframe is genuinely difficult for organizations that equate "experiment" with "risk."

The numbers that make the case

I know, everyone claims their approach drives better results. But the underlying logic here does check out quantitatively. Data from 2024 shows that organic search delivers a close rate of 14.6%, while outbound methods like cold calling or print ads close at just 1.7%. That gap exists because organic, content-driven growth marketing builds intent over time, rather than interrupting people who have none.

And once you have leads: by strengthening relationships with customers through growth marketing techniques, companies can often reduce customer turnover rates, build brand engagement, and lower acquisition costs.

Lower acquisition cost plus higher retention is the compound growth loop that makes this approach so durable.

What a growth marketeer actually does day to day

The role is genuinely different from a traditional marketing manager. Tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Mixpanel are table stakes, but what matters more is the thinking process. Data-driven decision-making, rapid prototyping, and running experiments across different channels and touchpoints to optimize performance are the core habits. A growth marketeer is part marketer, part analyst, part product thinker.

They obsess over things that traditional marketers often hand off: onboarding flows, email nurture sequences, churn data, referral mechanics. Growth marketers pay attention to retention metrics by examining the churn rate, the rate at which customers drop off. Churn is a marketing problem, not just a product or support problem. Most organizations have not wired their teams that way.

One practical detail from our own work: we started running weekly experiment reviews using a simple Notion board, tracking hypothesis, variant, result, and next action. It sounds basic. It changed how the whole team thought about what "good" marketing looks like.

Is growth marketing only for startups?

This is the assumption I push back on the most. Is growth marketing only for startups? To speak plainly, no. Growth marketing is for anyone and everyone willing to scale in their industry and establish a stronghold in the market.

Growth marketing fits well for fast-moving industries like SaaS, fintech, and technology. But it also fits companies that classify themselves as startups and scale-ups that need measurable results, rapid tests, and low upfront risk. The truth is that any business paying for marketing should want to know whether it actually drives revenue, not just reach. That desire is growth marketing, regardless of company size.

Where to start if this sounds like something you need

If you have read this far and recognized your own Q3 presentation in my story, the honest answer is: start with your existing data before adding any new channels.

Map where your current leads come from, where they drop off, and what the best customers have in common. That exercise alone usually surfaces two or three obvious levers. Then run a small test on one of them. Measure it properly. Decide what to do next based on results, not gut feel.

That is the loop. That is growth marketing in practice.

The Coursera overview on growth marketing fundamentals is a solid starting point if you want a broader theoretical grounding, and Toptal's breakdown of growth marketing strategies that still work is worth bookmarking for tactical ideas once you have the mindset right.

The founder in Ghent, by the way, is now a client. We stopped stopping at the click.

Tanguy De Keyzer is a growth strategist at Customer Impact, a Belgian growth marketing agency helping B2B companies turn marketing spend into measurable revenue.

Why your landing page converts poorly, a developer's CRO checklist

Tanguy De Keyzer — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:08:29 +0000

If your landing page gets traffic but few signups, the cause is usually technical and fixable: it loads too slowly, the main content renders late, the call to action is weak, or the form asks for too much. You do not need more traffic to fix this. You need a faster, clearer page. Here is a practical checklist, written for the people who actually build the page.

Marketers call this conversion rate optimization (CRO). For a developer, most of it is just good engineering: speed, clarity, and measurement. Let us go through it.

Start with load speed

Speed is the foundation. Every extra second of load time loses visitors, especially on mobile. A beautiful page that arrives late converts no one.

Measure your Core Web Vitals and fix the worst offenders first: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, slow server response. We keep a practical reference on this: Core Web Vitals. Ship modern image formats, lazy-load below the fold, and cut JavaScript you do not need.

Render the important content server side

AI crawlers are not the only thing that struggles with heavy client rendering. Real users on slow phones do too. If your headline and call to action only appear after a large bundle hydrates, you are losing people in the gap.

Put the core message and the primary action in the initial HTML. Server render or statically generate the parts that matter for the decision. Hydration can come after.

Make one clear next step

A page with ten actions effectively has none. Pick one primary action and make it impossible to miss.

Write the button to say what the visitor gets, not "Submit". The principles here are more psychology than code, and they are worth understanding: see Psychologie Conversie. Reduce choices around the call to action so nothing competes with it. A strong landing page is built around a single goal.

Shorten the form

Every field is friction. Each extra input is another reason to abandon.

Ask only for what you need to start a conversation, often a name and an email. Validate inline, show clear errors, and never make the user guess what went wrong. If you can autofill or remove a field, do it.

Instrument everything

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Add clean event tracking for page views, key interactions, and form submissions. Make sure your analytics fire reliably and are not blocked by your own consent setup.

Track three numbers: visitors, completed actions, and customers. That chain tells you where people drop and where the biggest win sits.

Test instead of guessing

Do not argue about opinions. Change one thing, measure it, keep what wins. That is the core of A/B testing.

Start with high-impact elements: the headline, the offer, and the primary action. Test small details later. Make sure you have enough traffic for a result to mean something, or you will chase noise.

Watch the consent and tracking gap

One trap catches a lot of teams: your own cookie banner or consent setup silently blocks the analytics you rely on. You ship a change, see no data, and conclude nothing happened, when in fact you were never measuring.

Before you trust any test, confirm events actually fire. Open the network tab, trigger the action, and check the request lands. Verify that a rejected consent state still lets you count anonymous, privacy-safe events where the law allows. A funnel you cannot see is a funnel you cannot fix.

The same goes for single-page apps. Route changes that do not trigger a page view will quietly undercount your funnel. Hook your analytics into the router so every step is recorded.

A quick checklist

Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s on mobile
Core message and CTA in the initial HTML
One primary action per page
Form reduced to the essential fields
Inline validation with clear errors
Reliable analytics on the full funnel
One A/B test running on a high-impact element

FAQ

Is CRO a developer job or a marketing job?
Both. Marketing decides the message and offer. Developers control the speed, rendering, and form behavior that decide whether the message ever lands. The best results come from the two working together.

What gives the fastest win?
Usually speed and a single clear call to action. They affect every visitor and are often the quickest to ship.

Bottom line

A page that converts is fast, clear, and built around one action, with measurement on the whole funnel. Fix those and you get more customers from the traffic you already have, no extra ad spend required.

I work at Customer Impact, a growth marketing agency that helps ambitious startups and scale-ups turn traffic into measurable growth. If you want a second set of eyes on your funnel, see how we approach conversion.