SEO takes 3–6 months minimum for most sites to see traffic gains, but competitive niches or new domains often need 6–12 months before ranking on page one. Google doesn't index and rank pages instantly—it crawls your site on a schedule (daily for established sites, weekly or slower for new ones), then evaluates hundreds of signals before adjusting rankings. Low-competition long-tail keywords can rank in weeks; high-volume commercial terms in finance, legal, or SaaS markets can take a year or more. Three factors control your timeline. Domain authority matters most—a ten-year-old site with 200 backlinks will rank new content faster than a six-month-old domain with five links. Competition level sets the bar; ranking for "Ottawa coffee shop" is faster than "personal injury lawyer Toronto" because the second has fifty firms spending $20k/month each on links and content. Execution speed also counts—publishing one article per month will lag behind a competitor shipping ten optimized pages with internal links and original data. At Ottawa SEO, we track early signals in weeks two through eight: indexed pages, crawl frequency in Search Console, and impressions for long-tail queries. Real traffic usually appears in month four for established sites, month six for newer ones. We consider a campaign working when organic traffic grows 25–40% year-over-year and at least five target keywords move into the top twenty positions. Red flags that slow timelines: technical issues like broken canonicals or crawl errors, thin content under 400 words, zero backlinks, or targeting keywords twenty steps above your current authority. If you're stuck after six months with no keyword movement at all, the strategy needs auditing—likely either technical blocks or a mismatch between your domain strength and keyword difficulty. SEO compounds over time, so month twelve typically delivers better ROI than month six, and year two beats year one.