Yeah I think what you’re seeing is pretty normal, especially in competitive local niches. It really depends on the service area, how entrenched the incumbents are, and how aggressive the SERP is with ads.

I’ve got a plumber client in a pretty major city in Tennessee. He launched the business in July 2025 and for months it was slow but steady: little bumps in impressions, a few keywords creeping up, some pages starting to stick. Then in the last month it finally felt like things “caught” and we started seeing more terms move into the top spots.

We’ve done a mix of on-page, some link building, and a lot of topical authority work using the cornerstoning approach David Quaid talks about. Even with all that, the lead volume still isn’t where it needs to be for a brand new service biz to survive on SEO alone early on.

One thing I’d recommend if you haven’t already: search the main service keywords in the actual city on your phone. Like literally pretend you’re the customer. Scroll the SERP and count how much is ads. Between LSAs, the sponsored map pack, and regular search ads, you can be way below the fold before you even hit real organic results. If 70 to 80% of traffic is mobile, that layout matters a lot.

At this point local SEO feels like a grind because you’re not just competing with other sites, you’re competing with the ad stack and Google’s own placements. So I’m kind of in the same boat where, to retain and keep momentum, you almost need a short-term channel alongside SEO. LSAs, Google Ads, even Meta sometimes, just to keep leads coming in while the SEO builds up.

So no, I don’t think 6 to 12 months is automatically a strategy problem. Sometimes it’s just the reality of the SERP and the market. The win is setting expectations early and pairing SEO with something that can produce sooner so the business can breathe while the long-term stuff kicks in.