When a person or company utilizes the services of an SEO professional, one of the biggest concerns is the time period it will take for the SEO to start working. This is a valid concern, as the point of search engine optimization is to gain rankings in the search engines and gain website popularity. Since a vast majority of Internet users choose Google as their search engine, SEO clients specifically want to know how quickly they will see results in Google.
In order to see movement in your page ranking, the first thing that needs to happen is that Google needs to re-index the website. Google has to re-index first so that it can pick up on the changes which were made to the website so that it can properly be positioned in the results. Since this is the first step in achieving a higher ranking in Google, one must wonder how long it takes Google to re-index website pages after SEO is performed.
In order to help with this answer, it is helpful if you know how often Google’s crawlers visited your website prior to the SEO taking place. Until Google recognizes the changes which were made to optimize your website, it will most likely scan your website on the same schedule. The only way to get re-indexed in Google is to have their crawlers visit your website again and scan the new information.
But wait, aren’t there other ways for Google’s crawler to enter my website aside from its normal visit? What I mentioned above is the normal scenario given that your website was not properly optimized! Since your website is now properly optimized, you now have inbound links to your website. Google can use these inbound links to enter your website and re-index your website. So now we are looking at how many times Google’s crawler visits the website which now links to your site.
In all honesty, there is no way to know how many times the website with an inbound link is visited, but here is some general information. Highly ranked websites in Google can be visited by the crawler several times a week. Middle of the road websites are normally visited a couple times a week and lower ranked websites are usually visited once or twice a month.
Generally it can take a day or two to a few weeks for Google to re-index your website. Unfortunately, SEO professionals have no control over how often a search engine crawler visits your website. Since you now have proper optimization though, the chances of the crawler visiting more frequently are going to increase.