When should an SEO company provide recommendations?
At three points: once the initial audit is finished, continually as results come in, and after a significant change in Google’s ranking systems has finished and settled. The first set is a ranked plan for the work ahead. The second arrives with each report, as data shows what is working. The third is the one where timing matters most, because Google’s own guidance is to wait before drawing conclusions, and a company that reacts in the middle of an update is guessing.
After the initial audit
The first recommendations should follow the audit directly, and the date should be in the project plan. What arrives matters as much as when. A useful set is a ranked list: which issues to address first, why each matters, what effect each fix is expected to have, and who should make the change. A long list of every problem found, without order or reasoning, means the work has stopped halfway. Ask whether the recommendations are ordered by expected impact and effort, so the most valuable items are done first.
Continually, with each report
Once changes are made and tracked, the data shows things the audit could not: a page expected to climb stalls, an update does better than planned, demand in your market shifts. Each of these should lead to new recommendations. A report that lists numbers without interpretation or proposed next steps is incomplete. Ask a prospective company whether every report ends with recommended actions, and how it decides when a recommendation from an earlier report has been overtaken by new data.
After a ranking update has settled
Google announces significant ranking updates and records when each starts and ends on its Search Status Dashboard. Rollouts vary in length; the dashboard’s own records range from under two weeks for some core updates to 45 days for the March 2024 core update. Google’s page on core updates sets out when to look: “We recommend waiting at least a full week after a core update completes before analyzing your site in Search Console.” It continues: “After a week, try comparing this week with a week before the core update started rolling out; this way you’ll be able to better pinpoint what exactly has changed.”
So the right moment for recommendations prompted by an update is after the rollout has ended and a further week has passed, based on a comparison of those two weeks. A company that recommends sweeping changes while an update is still rolling out is reacting to movement that has not finished.
Putting the timing of advice into the plan
Ask the company to state in the project plan when the first recommendations will arrive, how recommendations will appear in each report, and how it will handle ranking updates: who watches the dashboard, when it will analyze the effect, and when you will hear from it. That makes the timing of advice something you can check rather than something you wait for.