Vander Els Partners
Usually months, not weeks, and the honest range depends on where you are starting from. Here is why, and how to tell the difference between slow and not working.
What has to happen before the phone moves
Google has to find the changes, trust them, and then re-rank you against companies it has trusted for years. Each of those takes time you do not control. A new service page has to be crawled and indexed. A fixed listing has to be re-evaluated. Citations and local links accumulate slowly by design, because the slow accumulation is what makes them a signal. Anything that moves rankings in days can be reversed in days, and usually is.
Where you start from matters most
A business with a healthy site, a clean listing and a few years of reviews is starting close to the line. Fixing the technical problems and adding the right pages can show movement within a few months.
A business with a new domain, a suspended or duplicated listing, a slow site and no reviews is starting further back, and the first months are spent making the foundation stable before anything can be built on it. That work is invisible from the outside and it is where a lot of engagements lose the owner's patience.
How to tell slow from broken
Slow looks like this: the grid measurement moves a little each month in the same direction, new pages get indexed, the listing stays clean, and the reviews keep coming. The phone is not different yet, but every number that comes before the phone is.
Broken looks like this: nothing on the grid moves for months, pages that were added are not indexed, and the only evidence of work is a report saying work was done. If the leading numbers are flat, the phone is not going to change either, and someone owes you a straight answer about why.
Ask for the grid. If your agency does not measure one, you cannot tell slow from broken, and neither can they.
What to run in the meantime
Paid search moves in days, and it is the honest way to get calls while the slow work is happening. Page one in thirty days from "SEO" is almost always paid traffic under another name. Have it be paid traffic under its own name, and let search take the time it takes.
The short version
Months. Measure the numbers that come before the phone so you can see it moving, and run paid alongside it so the phone rings while you wait. Then you will know whether it is slow or broken, and you will not have to guess for a year.