Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities for health and wellness brands can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to work. Successful SEO is personal to your brand and is based on your goals and your website status.

4 Factors Impacting the YMYL SEO Timeline

As a YMYL brand, these 4 factors are core to your SEO timeline and strategy:


  1. Your website age and domain authority: Google relies on history when determining how reliable, relevant, and authoritative your website is. New websites do not have a history with Google. So, it takes longer to be found and ranked. Older websites (with a good reputation) have established domain authority and a proven reputation with Google. These websites benefit from SEO activities faster than new websites.
  2. Your competitors: Having competitors with strong domain authority and who rank high in the search engine results page (SERP) impacts how long your SEO takes. These pages are the first choice of search engines. You need to convince search engines that your website is the better choice.
  3. Your technical SEO status: Server configuration, website architecture, and website speed impact how long your SEO takes. Website speed and how long it takes a page to load is a critical technical SEO factor. Slow website speed results in high bounce rates and a poor user experience. Search engine bots don’t want to work hard to crawl and index your website. Optimize your website architecture and server configuration to make it easy for search engine bots to do their job.
  4. Your content quality: search engines judge your content and use this to determine relevance and authority. Search engines want content that proves experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-E-A-T). As a YMYL brand, it’s imperative your content is accurate, well-researched, informative, helpful, and trustworthy. 

Essential SEO Tactics for Health and Wellness Brands

These SEO tactics help search engines find and get to know you, building trust so your website ranks higher in the SERPs. 

These are the things I look for when building an SEO strategy for new and existing clients. 

  • Technical Audit. A technical audit reveals how well your website is optimized for search engines. Broken links, poor security, duplicate content, slow site speed, poor mobile design, missing an XML sitemap, hreflang errors, and confusing URL structure are red flags during a technical audit. 
  • Competitive Keyword Gap Analysis. A competitive keyword gap analysis is key to creating a strategy around your best keyword opportunities. You need to know which good search volume keywords your competitors are and aren’t ranking for. You should also look for keywords that you are ranking in the top 20 with – the goal is to move to the top of the SERPs. 
  • Search Intent. Search intent tells us what people are looking for and the kind of information they need. Your website becomes popular with search engines when you answer the questions people are asking. You need to audit your content, looking at search intent and how you can be better at providing the content people are searching for. Content can be high level such as answering questions that are related to your brand, or more specific to your products.
  • Internal Linking. Search engines and your readers use internal links to find their way around your website, and discover if you have all the information they need. This helps you establish E-E-A-T and proves your site contains helpful content. Make sure you use internal links to direct people and search engines to the most important pages on your website and remember to use keywords as your anchor text. 
  • High-Quality Content. Google and other search engines prioritize ranking reliable content that helps people. It is a bad idea to create content solely for search engine rankings. This hurts your SEO. To evaluate your content, follow guidance from Google and other search engines, consider search intent and the type of website you have, and use our content quality checklists.
  • E-E-A-T and AI. As a YMYL brand it’s important you prove experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-E-A-T). Google wants content that proves the author has first-hand experience with the topic. This is not something AI tools have. YMYL brands need to work with proven content specialists. People who know how to use tools like SEMrush, Google, and ChatGPT for research. People who understand FDA content guidelines and Google’s standards for E-E-A-T and helpful content. 

Make sure you read Google’s guidance on AI content and its role on your website.


SEO takes time. SEO requires consistency. SEO requires constant strategy adjustment. SEO is not a checkmark on your to do list. SEO should not be “done” after a few months of activities.  It should be an on-going strategy in your marketing plan, integrated into everything that you do.

Your SEO agency should be 100% transparent about their SEO strategy and how well it is (or isn’t) working and why their recommendations are taking longer than expected. 

The great news is that, when SEO is done right you are likely to start to see success after 3 months.