The question is, can SEOs give their clients timelines for when they can expect improvements on their SEO or ranking issues in Google Search? The answer is, it depends on the issue and how specific the timeline is.
Let me share the Twitter thread between Pedro Dias, a former Googler, and John Mueller of Google:
Some change-timelines can be fairly well-estimated though, even for unknown sites. Eg, if a site is crawled normally, a site-wide noindex will be visible in search traffic within about a week. Other changes less so ("improve quality").
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 8, 2021
It usually doesn't matter as long as it's not fully blocking. We tend to crawl pages that are more visible more often, so even if we can crawl 1% of what we want, those would often be the ones commonly shown = have a noticable impact if they disappear. Not universal, but almost.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 8, 2021
So while you can tell a client that a core update fix, a quality issue, can take several months it also depends on if that client is willing to revamp a lot of the site and content on that site. But if you placed a noindex directive on your site, removing it, will lead to a quick restore of indexing over a shorter period of time. Or if all the site's pages have generic title tags that say "tile goes here" and you change them to relevant titles, then I assume a site like that will see a very quick boost in rankings. But it all depends on what the issue is, what needs to take place to solve the issue and how quickly Google can react to those changes.
So yea, some things can be quick and you can plan out a timeline for a fix. Other things might not be quick and might be dependent on third-parties or your clients to fix, and you cannot guarantee a timeline on those changes. And with anything Google, you simply do not control everything like you may in other forms of businesss.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
