Use 4-6 months as a planning window for meaningful organic traffic or ranking movement, not as a guaranteed result date. A jewelry store starting with crawl problems, thin category pages, weak local information, or strong local competitors may need a different pace than a store with a technically sound site and established search visibility.
Around that window: 3-4 months in less saturated markets, 6-8 months in more competitive urban markets. Those ranges describe when meaningful movement may become visible, not when revenue must appear. The first 2-3 months can be used to diagnose technical issues, map search intent to existing pages, improve important local and commercial pages, and establish measurement. The linked budget guide is useful for comparing that early work with the recurring scope that follows.
Some local changes can be assessed sooner. Use 4-8 weeks as a check-in window for items such as corrected business information, citation cleanup, and changes to Google Business Profile presentation. It is the right window to observe profile visibility and interactions, while remembering that a single profile edit does not by itself show what caused a ranking change.
When judging progress, separate stages: implementation first, indexing and visibility next, then qualified traffic and business outcomes. That prevents a technical completion date from being confused with a ranking or revenue milestone.