SAM NELSON
Ah, the almighty Google search box.
Website developers spend a lot of time trying to make sure their pages show up directly beneath that box, at the top of Google’s first page of search results.
Reaching the top of the search rankings does not happen overnight, especially for small businesses with little or no existing web presence.
According to multiple sources, the average time for websites to rank on Google through optimization (SEO) techniques is about three to six months.
That’s right – jumping to the front of Google’s results usually takes between 90-180 days, depending on the competitiveness of your industry and popularity of your keywords. For several reasons we’ll discuss below (competition, domain age, content accumulation, etc.) a high ranking may take as much as a year in competitive fields.
This can be frustrating for developers and clients alike. We just put weeks into building a new site! It looks great and no one is seeing it! Why isn’t Google recognizing us?
Don’t worry. In this case, doing everything right doesn’t mean immediate results. Ranking on Google is a process, not a magic trick.
To understand which websites appear at the top of Google‘s rankings, first, we need to dive into how Google finds those pages and adds them to your search results.
How Does Google Find My Page?
Software programs called “Googlebots” (also known as bots, robots, or spiders) move or “crawl” through billions of web pages, collecting and cataloging information that is added to Google’s index of the web. For your webpage to reach Google’s index, the spiders must be able to crawl and read the information on your site.
This video from Google explains in more detail how the search function works:
Like the nice man in the pink shirt says, when you search through Google, you are actually searching the Google index, not the whole Internet. Google uses an algorithm to match your query to the bazillion pages it has on file.
The algorithm considers more than 250 factors, including keywords, titles, and content tags. The algorithm also incorporates PageRank, a separate program that measures each page’s importance according to the amount and quality of traffic from other sites.
How Are Websites Ranked?
When you type a search into Google, pages are selected from the index according to how well they match up to your specific query.
There is no exact formula for placing your website at the top of a Google search. However, the following factors play a key role in the ranking process:
- SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures that your website is visible to Googlebots and other indexing programs. This includes things like titles, keywords, headings, and ALT image text.
- Domain age. A web domain less than six months old is considered a “new” site, and therefore less trustworthy or reliable than an older website that has been thoroughly verified. New sites can still be ranked, but rankings are more likely to increase after the six-month window.
- Keyword competition. Words or phrases that are searched often are highly competitive, and more established sites in your industry have a head start on ranking for popular searches. If your site is new, it will be easier to build trust and rankings through keywords with lower levels of competition before moving on to more popular searches.
- Content quality. The Googlebots are designed to identify characteristics like how often new content is published, whether the content is original, as well as the length and overall quality of your posts. Regularly adding new, original, high-quality content to your page will keep the search bots looking at your page, and could lead to higher rankings as time passes.
- Clean domain. Google’s algorithm is also designed to spot when websites try to cheat the system with tricks like keyword stuffing or buying inbound links. These schemes may work for a while, but when Google catches on, your site will be penalized. Your ranking will suffer until you correct the problem, which can be a lengthy and difficult process.
(Hat tip: reliablesoft.net)
So if you’re maintaining your page with good content, keeping your domain clear of any shady shortcuts, and focusing on low-competition keywords that will build your online authority… be patient.
You’re on your way.
https://websitemuscle.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank-on-google/
How long does it take to rank in Google? (A study by Ahrefs)
“How long till my website (page) ranks on top of Google?”
The common response to this question is obviously, “It depends,” because there are just too many variables to consider: website strength, competition, budget, skills, etc.
But here at Ahrefs, we decided to sift through the petabytes of historical ranking data that we have and give you a slightly more quantifiable answer, something more concrete than simply, “It depends.”
How old are the top-ranking pages?
For starters, we identified how old the current top-ranking pages are.
We took 2 million random keywords and pulled data on the Top10 ranking pages for each of them. Which resulted in this beautiful graph:
As you can tell from this graph, the average Top10 ranking page is 2+ years old. And those that rank at position #1 are almost 3 years old (on average).
In fact, only 22% of pages that currently rank in the Top10 were created within 1 year:
This doesn’t look too promising, right? The SERP is clearly dominated by “old” pages.
How long does it take for a page to rank in Google?
To answer this question, we randomly selected 2 million pages that were first seen by Ahrefs crawler a year ago.
We then tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for.
Which resulted in this graph:
Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.
Pages from websites with a high Domain Rating (DR) performed way better than those with a low DR. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, because Ahrefs’ Domain Rating metric (shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile) correlates well with Google rankings.
We then zoomed into these 5.7% of “lucky” pages to see how quickly they got from nowhere to the Top10.
The majority of them managed to achieve that in approximately 61-182 days.
By looking at this graph, you might think that, on average, it takes a page anywhere from 2-6 months to rank in Google’s Top10.
But that conclusion isn’t valid here, because this data only represents the 5.7% of pages that were lucky enough to rank in the Top10 within a year — while almost 95% of all the pages we studied didn’t make it to the Top10 within that timeframe.
We also re-calculated the numbers based on monthly search volume of the keywords:
Only 0.3% of pages ranked in the Top10 for a high-volume keyword in less than a year.
And here are the dynamics of these 5.7% “lucky” pages, broken down by search volume of the keyword that they ranked for:
Clearly, you can rank for low-volume keywords in a very short time, while the high-volume ones take almost a year to get into the Top10.
But again, don’t forget that this data only applies to 5.7% of “lucky” pages that ranked in the Top10 within a year. The vast majority of pages don’t perform that well.
What does this all mean?
Did our study give a definite answer to “how long does it take to rank” question?
No.
But at least we’ve shown that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year.
And most of the “lucky” ones, which do manage to get there, do it in about 2-6 months.
Actually, I shouldn’t be framing these pages as “lucky,” because the reason they got to the Top10 in less than a year is most likely hard work and great knowledge of SEO, not luck.
Check out these tips from Sam Oh if you want to rank #1 in Google quicker:
Here’s to hard work and dedication!
https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank/
