It depends on a lot of things. Keyword research, competition, quality of the SEO work, etc.

You can get results in as little as a day, or sometimes it takes a lot longer. Just depends.

Depends on the keyword term(s) you're trying to rank for...but as a general rule of thumb, I tell my clients that no results are solid until at least 3 months time.

as Ashley said,

It really depends on all the work you do , and keyword competition

and quality link your guy developed.

If it is medium level competition, it may reach to top in 3 -4 months.

That is not guaranty too. But 90 % of time, it happens.

I think the results of SEO vary from project to project. The little I have done so far leads me to believe that a month would be a safe time to calculate results over.

The result of SERP is subject to the keyword you are targeting, if your keyword is tough then increase in SERP might not be noticeable.

The position you are before outsourcing for back links matter too. If your are on the 11th position and the top 10 are aged domain with lots of good links then you might not see any changes quick.

The type/quality of links you are using plays a big role as well.

Usually you get results after two months or something like that for low to average keywords if you do this process truly and without mistakes. And for competitive keywords, it takes more than 6 months usually but still depends on the keyword.

Typically you will notice improvements as soon as Google crawls the links.
Obviously whether you will move or not has a lot to do with competition and the types of links you have created.

These days it's a lot faster than it used be.

I would never hire someone to do this for me because I know for a fact from others that there is no guarantee that you will get your site ranked high.

There are a lot of dishonest people out there who just want to take your money and promise you lot of things that may not happen.

For a aigh competetive keyword, I managed to get a site #3 within in one month. It depends on various variables as stated earlier in this thread. There isn't a strict time limit one can give you.

Also, you should tell us what kind of linkbuilding you are doing, how much you are doing it, how much your competetion is.. Well you know, the works!

Steven

Just make sure you don't go with some fool who'll take shortcuts that will wind up getting your site de-indexed. I've seen it happen so be careful.

I think it depends...upon quality of SEO work.

Apart from the SEO part, there are other factors like quality of website, competition, keywords selected etc.

Completely variable on keyword competition, your SEO plan, and sometimes factors you don't even know about. After experimenting with it for a while you'll be able to estimate it better for yourself.