We often get asked by our clients, how long before they can see their websites in the top positions.
It is a tough question to answer as there is no magic formula to find out when you will be ranking on the first page. It’s not just but no one can tell you how long it takes, not even the Googlers.
However, over the years we have gained the experience to lay out the factors that play the most important role in ranking your websites. Google has officially accepted that there are more than 255 ranking factors, but the most important ones that affect 80% chances of ranking in the top 10 SERPs. Let’s have a look at these factors.
Domain Age
The older a website is more trusted it is by Google, making its chances of ranking higher in SERP better. That being said all other factors should remain equal. You should not take it as an indication that new sites cannot rank higher over old websites, it will only take more time.
We have witnessed that new domains (i.e. the domains that are active for less than 6 months) can get some serious traffic on your site. Some webmasters also call it the Sandbox period. This is why we recommend you to be patient during the first 6 months of launching your website and work on content and link building. These 6 months are very crucial to get higher rankings.
Clean Domain
The health of your domain is another factor that can make or break your SEO efforts.
A clean domain is the one that has not ever been manually or algorithmically penalized by Google. It is simple to find out if the domain is penalized or not.
- Log in to the Google Search Console and select the website you want to check. Then on the dashboard go to Manual Actions option under the Search Traffic menu. If your website is manually penalized by Google then it will appear here else you will get the message ‘No manual webspam actions found’.
- Algorithmic penalties are little tough to make out. The most accurate method to find out about such penalties is to use the Google Analytics tool. Open the search traffic source tab and select Google as the traffic source.
Look for any drastic change in traffic around the time when any Google algorithm change has occurred. If you find a connection between the two events then you can safely say that your website is penalized and accordingly can work on its recovery.
It is important to make sure that your website is not penalized because if it is, then no matter how much efforts you put in, Google will not rank the site until its rectified of the errors. It will be better to start with a new domain for improved ranking chances.
Competition for the keywords
Not all keywords are equal and the competition to rank for those keywords is also dramatically varied. The stronger the competition for a keyword the more focused and intense approach it will need to rank for that keyword.
Most clients we work with try to focus on the most competitive and popular keywords. This is simply not going to happen unless you have a strong and trusted website. This is why it is better to focus on low competing keywords and once you rank higher for them go on to high competing keywords.
Content type
Time needed to rank on Google is also affected by the type of content present on your website. For instance, news articles will rank faster than blogs and stories because of their timely relevancy. This applies to images as well. The images that are more relevant to a trending topic will rank higher in the search results as compared to other images.
This is why it is important that you keep the type of content your website deals in to get a better idea of how long will it take for your website to appear at the top results.
SEO optimized titles
Without a doubt, the title of your articles is very important. Content with SEO optimized titles always ranks higher faster than the ones with the non-optimized title. It is an important factor especially for new bloggers and webmasters with no strong author profile or domain authority.
If you have wrong titles then no matter how worthy the content is it will not rank well, at least not in the short term. This is why page titles are of such importance for newer websites. Unless you have a high authority website, you need to pay attention to optimize your page titles with keywords.
Content-Length
Another important factor that is proven to affect search result ranking is the length of the content. In his detailed report on How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions, Neil Patel has elaborated that the content of more than 2000 words has better chances of ranking in the top 10 positions in Google.
This is why when you are working with new websites, creating in-depth detailed articles will positively affect the ranking capability of your website. Also, the frequency of content update on the website plays a major role in boosting the rank of your website. When you regularly publish content on your website it is indexed faster by the search engines which in turn help the website to rank faster.
Conclusion
Ranking in Google takes time and you should be patient. You may have to wait for 3-4 months before you can see a surge in traffic from Google. By the time keep working on all the factors we have listed here.
Once you start getting traffic from Google, you can work on the strategies to improve traffic and site quality to build an authority for your website.
