How long does it take for SEO to be effective?

[Sam S.]

If I want to be on the first page of google results for my town how long do you think it will take an SEO company to get there, if at all.  I am thinking that one month of SEO will do hardly anything.  Am I wrong? 

[Darrell Shepherd]

Depends a LOT on your competition and what you are targeting.

I could rank for "sell my busted up shack in nowhere, GA" in a month because nobody else is trying to be there.

It would take a year or more and real money to rank for "we buy houses" There are companies out there that are spending massive coin on adwords on some searches in our market, I guess they are selling leads or something.

I'm 6 months in for "we buy houses atlanta" and am  at 80 on google and 40 on Yahoo and am spending some decent money to be that far up.  I haven't been doing some things to help my SEO guys (blogging, video, etc), though.  Mainly because I've got 4 rehabs going and need to be getting them fixed and sold more than buying more...

My timeline is a year and ($6k or so) to get to page 1.

There's plenty to read up on that stuff if you've got the time.  

But yes, generally speaking one month of SEO will get you nothing, except for maybe someone getting your keywords and meta tags and such set up right.  SEO companies are also super vague on what they are doing, so making sure they aren't just taking your money for nothing is hard to do without a few months/year of progress reporting. 

I imagine there are guys on here that know WAY more than I do, if you share your market and site, you'll probably get some great advice.