The question we get most after launch is some version of “when will I show up on Google?” The honest answer is that it depends on what someone is searching for. Your business name shows up fast. Searches like “window cleaning Leander” take a few months. Broad searches like “window cleaning Austin” can take a year or more.
Google says the same thing in its own guide to hiring an SEO: it usually takes four months to a year to see results. Below is what that looked like for two real sites, with the numbers from their Search Console accounts.
The short answer
- Your business name: days to a few weeks after Google finds the site.
- Your service plus your town: usually two to six months, if you have a real page for that town.
- Broad, competitive searches: six to twelve months or longer, and they depend heavily on reviews and links from other sites.
How to read the numbers
Google Search Console shows three numbers that matter here, and they move in this order:
- Impressions: how many times your site appeared in search results. This moves first.
- Average position: Google’s average ranking across every search you appeared for. Lower is better. Position 1 to 10 is page one.
- Clicks: how many people clicked through. This moves last, because almost nobody clicks a result on page three or four.
If your impressions are growing and your position is slowly dropping toward page one, SEO is working, even if clicks are still low.
Example 1: a window cleaning company in Leander
Mason Hoff Window Cleaning launched a brand new site in June 2026 on a brand new domain. Here is what the first three months looked like.
- July: the site showed up 679 times in search over 28 days, at an average position of 41.7. That is page four or five.
- August: impressions roughly tripled to 2,030, but the average position barely moved (42.2). Google was showing the site for more searches, just not near the top yet.
- September: impressions reached 2,980 and the average position jumped to 28.9, about thirteen places in one month.
The clearest single win was his Georgetown page. “Window cleaning Georgetown TX” went from position 29 to 17 after we published a Georgetown page written from jobs he had done there.
One thing worth noting: the website brought in work before it ranked. In September three people sent quote requests through the site and all three became jobs, while only a handful of visitors came from Google search. Most came from his Google Business Profile, word of mouth or typing in his web address, then used the website to decide.
Example 2: a pressure washing company in Austin
Just The Right Pressure moved to a new site in July 2026. In the first month Google had crawled the homepage but had not added it to search yet, which is normal for a new domain.
- Month 1: 433 impressions, 4 clicks, average position 34.4.
- Month 2: 2,200 impressions, 10 clicks, average position 26.3.
By September the site ranked first for its own business name, and the Georgetown page reached position 18 for “georgetown pressure washing”. That was the first time it ranked for a service and town search, which is how most people looking to hire actually search.
What sped things up
- A complete Google Business Profile. For a local business the profile often brings in more calls than the website in the first few months. Categories, services, service area, photos and hours should all be filled in and match the website.
- Reviews. Reviews affect where you show up on Google Maps and whether people pick you. Mason went from 18 to 35 reviews over the summer. We wrote up how to ask for reviews separately.
- City pages with real detail. Pages built from real jobs in that town, with photos from those jobs, ranked. Pages that only swapped the town name did not.
- Links and listings. Links from other websites and consistent directory listings tell Google your business is real. When we checked in September, Mason had links from 9 other websites. His biggest competitors had more than 100 each, which explains a lot of the gap.
What did not help
- Rewriting page titles to get more clicks while the site sat on page four. Almost nobody sees a page four result, so there is nothing to improve yet.
- Pressing “Request indexing” over and over. It helps Google find a new page sooner, but it does not make Google rank a page it does not trust yet. Reviews, links and time do that.
- Making lots of near-identical town pages. Google treats them as one page and ignores the rest.
What to expect from your own site
If your site is new, expect your business name to show up within a few weeks, your impressions to grow every month, and your average position to start dropping somewhere in months two to four. Phone calls from search usually follow once you reach page one or two for your service and town.
In the meantime, your Google Business Profile and your reviews will do most of the work, so start there.
Every site we build launches with the SEO groundwork in place, and our monthly plans keep working on it after launch. If you want to know where your current site stands, ask for a free audit or give us a call.