How long does SEO take to work?

Most SEO takes 3 to 6 months to show early movement, better rankings for easier keywords, more impressions in Search Console, and 6 to 12 months for real, meaningful traffic and ranking gains on competitive terms.

It's slow at first because search engines need time to crawl changes, trust new content, and see consistent signals before adjusting rankings. Anyone promising results in a few weeks is either selling something misleading or working on a term with almost no competition.