How long does an SEO company take to build links?
Link building runs on two clocks, and neither has a fixed length. The first is the time it takes to earn each link, which depends on the method and on other people’s schedules. The second is the time before a new link is found by Google and can count, which no SEO company controls. A company can tell you how much outreach it will do each month and what kinds of links it is pursuing; it cannot honestly promise a number of links by a date or a ranking change by a date. Ask for its own written estimate for your site and a monthly record of the links it has earned, and judge the work on that record.
Earning a link depends on the method and on other people
Every link the company earns depends on someone else agreeing to publish it. The company has to find sites that suit your business, understand what they publish, reach the person who decides, and follow up. Not every contact leads to a link, so the outreach behind each link is larger than the result. When a site does agree, the timing moves to its schedule: an article has to be written, edited by the host, and published when the host has room. Some routes are quicker, such as asking a site to replace a broken link with a working one to your page, or to add your resource to a list it already maintains, because the change on the other site is small.
Why speed is the wrong target
The quick ways to produce links in volume are the ones Google’s spam policies name as link spam, including “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes” and “Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.” A company that promises a fast, fixed number of links each month is either relying on methods like these or promising something it does not control. A steady record of links you can check, from sites that make sense for your business, is a better sign than a high count.
When a link starts to count
A link cannot help until Google has found the page that carries it, so there is a gap between a link going live and any effect. You can watch part of this in Search Console’s Links report, but read it with its limits in mind. Google says: “This report isn’t a comprehensive list of every link on your site.” It also says: “The report includes links that Google has found over time. These links may have since been removed, or a page may no longer exist.” So the report shows a new link only after Google has found it, and can keep showing links that are gone. For checking the company’s work month by month, its own list of live links is the primary record, and the Links report is a slower second view.
Links also disappear
Pages are taken down, sites close, and articles are edited without your link. Over a long engagement, part of the work is checking that earlier links are still in place and replacing ones that are lost. This is one reason to treat link building as continuing work rather than a one-off project, and it is worth asking how the company tracks links it has already earned.
Making link building checkable month by month
Ask the company for a written estimate of when it expects the links to show an effect for your site, and what it will measure in the meantime. Ask how much outreach it will do each month, which methods it will use, and whether any links are paid for. Ask for a monthly list of every link earned, with the page it sits on, so you can open each one yourself. And ask what the company does when a link it built disappears.