Reading through the industry forums for construction and the remodeling industry, I frequently see business owners asking how long they should expect to wait before their organic strategy starts generating leads. The responses are typically vague if given by an SEO provider, pointing to differences in regional demographics and seasonality. Either that, or the responses are super precise, like a remodeler explaining their own anecdotal experience with SEO. So, if you want a benchmark to compare your own website performance to, the existing answers to this question may not give you the info you need.

Maybe I can help with that! I am the head statistician at Spectrum Communications, a digital marketing agency specialized in the remodeling industry. With our deep pool of data from remodeling partners, we can answer this question very specifically, but also in a way that can be generalized to your business.

Define your goals

Before we jump in, we need to set some parameters: what does success look like for your digital marketing program? The goal of your whole digital presence should be to generate leads. Tag your other marketing lead sources (your canvassing, your radio ads, etc) with unique phone numbers and URLs, so that you don’t confuse those results for website results. Then, compare the growth in leads, month-over-month and also versus your starting point before the new strategy. With that information in hand, you will have a way to measure your organic strategy’s success.

OK, I bet you’re getting tired of all the statistical jargon – you want to know how long digital marketing takes to increase your organic lead generation. Let’s get right to it, then! By 6 months, our partners in the remodeling industry experienced 84% growth*. After one full year, we caused 114% growth, more than doubling baseline results. Have a look at the particulars below. We charted out average monthly visitor counts for ease of interpretation.

How does it work?

Our typical remodeling partner joins our service with an existing website – but that site is underutilized and not professionally managed. From that baseline, our account managers go to work, utilizing the full spectrum of digital marketing best practices. We build out sites from a group of core pages, expanding the number of indexed pages and lead-generating keywords. Your account manager ensures that all local listing services are aligned, preventing a costly drain on your optimization. Everything we do is mobile friendly, moving you up the page on Google. Our patented reputation management engine generates reviews, building your site’s credibility to both customers and search engines.

So, there you have it! Finally, an answer to that age old question: how long does it take SEO to work? These results are driven by our account managers knowing your business and understanding how users interact with your business online. If you aren’t seeing results from your digital marketing efforts (and by results I mean leads), it isn’t that digital marketing doesn’t work in your industry – it definitely does! The problem may be an issue of expertise. If you have hired internally, it may take your newly minted “search engineer” a period of trial and error to find out what works. If you’ve hired an expert or an agency and are not seeing these sorts of results, it’s time to find an agency that better understands your industry.

* Methodology, IE the statistical nitty-gritty: In case you’re wondering, here is how we got these figures. First off, we control for start date by month and year – seasonality plays no role in this data, or rather we’ve removed the role that it did play. Secondly, we do not represent competitor companies, so each remodeling company here is the sole Spectrum partner in their service area. The average of each geography is unweighted as a result, so when we look at the data in aggregate, it won’t be lopsided in any geographic direction. In short, these figures are true national averages.