The question is, can SEOs give their clients schedules when they can expect improvements to their SEO or ranking issues in Google Search? The answer is, it depends on the problem and how specific the timeline is.
Let me share the twitter thread between Pedro Dias, a former Googler, and John Mueller of Google:
However, some change times can be estimated fairly well even for unknown websites. For example, if a site is crawled normally, a site-wide noindex will be visible in search traffic within about a week. Others change less (“improve quality”).
– 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 8, 2021
It usually doesn’t matter as long as it’s not completely blocked. We tend to crawl more frequently pages that are more visible. Even if we can crawl 1% of what we want, they’ll show up often = have a noticeable impact when they go away. Not universal, but almost.
– 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 8, 2021
So while you can tell a customer that a core update fix, a quality issue, could take several months, it also depends on that customer’s willingness to do a major overhaul of the site and the content on that site. However, once you have placed a noindex directive on your site, removing it will result in a quick re-indexing over a shorter period of time. Or if all of the pages on the site have generic title tags that say “tile goes here” and you change them to relevant titles, then I assume that such a site will rank up very quickly. But it all depends on what the problem is, what needs to be done to resolve the problem, and how quickly Google can respond to those changes.
So yes, some things can go quickly and you can plan a troubleshooting schedule. Other things may not be quick and need to be fixed by a third party or your customers, and you cannot guarantee a timeline for these changes. And with all that Google has, you just don’t control everything like you might in other forms of business.
Forum discussion on Twitter.
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