Clients always ask, "How long does it take to rank on Google?" It's a loaded question, partly because:
We have noticed a disappointing trend, particularly as it relates to high-volume, global keywords:
The process for ranking and vesting, which used to take 6-9 months, now takes closer to 3-5 years.
In some cases, and for some keywords, it takes even longer.
That's a heart-wrenching prospect, particularly for a startup that may want to outrank a long-standing competitor.
We put together a comprehensive list of all the most highly correlated Google ranking factors.
But chief among them, which is not listed, is TIME. That includes a vesting time for:
Keep in mind that this vesting assumes all else as being equal to other high-ranking websites, including the quality of the site's content in driving organic traffic.
Let's explore some of these issues a bit further.
If you wanted to give users the best possible online experience, would you want flash-in-the-pan upstarts with a little technical system-gaming know-how to be able to unseat 50 to 100-year-old established brands?
The search engine doesn't think so.
You need to build trust, and trust takes time.
Backlinks are only one of the Google rankings factors that help determine trust.
Trust comes from search engine crawlers, working to understand your site structure and how it fits in with the rest of the web.
So, here's the good news: as your website ages past the three and 5-year mark, you will notice something, and it will suddenly become easier to rank.
Your backlinks didn't change, and your content may not have updated in a while, but suddenly, your site finally starts to rank for things that matter to you.
Consider the following two studies by Moz and Ahrefs:
The older your page is, the higher the likelihood it will have of achieving higher Google rankings in the SERPs.
Consider this: the average age of position 1 in Google is nearly 950 days old! That's the average!
If you've been blogging like a beast for two years, tuning all your pages and doing plenty of off-site promotion, and you're wondering why you can't seem to beat the "XYZ brand," who outranks you in search, just give it time.
If you've been engaging in link schemes, buying paid links, or otherwise pushing too heavily in one area but ignoring factors in another, your web page may be subject to a reshuffle.
There are also algorithm weights that change with each update in Google's algorithm, which may trigger re-shifts in your Google rankings.
A reshuffled is also known as the Google Dance and can last for a day or for months at a time until you make the necessary changes.
Here are just a few.
If you wanted to change from:
SEO.co/backlinks to SEO.co/link-building or even from BobsMarketingAgency.com to Marketer.co, you are likely to see a negative impact on your site's rankings.
While it goes without saying that, in doing so, you would also create the appropriate 301 redirects in either your .htaccess or REGEX file, you should also consider the rankings impact of such a decision.
While most of the ranking will continue to flow, your redirect may pose its own issues and even cause a drop in rankings or, worse still, a reset of your vesting for a particular phrase or term. A vesting reset can drop you back and take months or even years to resurrect fully.
While admins at Google will tell you they ignore spammy backlinks for ranking, they don't tell you that the worst backlinks can actually cause your rankings to be pushed down even more.
Negative SEO (aka, "Google bowling") typically consists of either site hacks or pointing backlinks to a competitor's site from nefarious neighborhoods on the web.
While you can disavow and request the removal of these links, they may have a negative impact that could add months to your site vesting and keep your rankings suppressed for a very long time.
If you work to scale your total indexed pages in a relatively short period with increased content velocity, you may see an overall drop in your rankings for the following reasons:
You need enough content to rank but be sure you don't garble the message by creating content just for the sake of SEO content.
You'll want to create relevant content that adds value to your target audience.
When your website is not diversified in its ranking factors, there is a higher likelihood of receiving an algorithmic adjustment downward, particularly in the next Google algorithm update.
Notice I did not title it "algorithmic penalties."
An algorithmic penalty is a misnomer.
Search engines will mete out manual penalties or manual actions, but the algorithm only adjusts based on math and weights.
What may look to be a penalty may simply be the algorithm:
Unless you have had a manual action, algorithmic blocks are typically not permanent and can be reversed, but you just have to focus on fundamental search engine optimization (SEO) strategy on-page and off-page.
When it comes to ranking more quickly, there are a few questions you will need to ask, particularly as it relates to your content marketing strategy:
We have found the best way to shorten the gap to rank is as follows:
Your content doesn't need to be longer, nor does it use the Skyscraper technique (length does not always equal higher quality), but it does need to be better.
It needs to be MORE informative, MORE engaging, and MORE entertaining.
We have an internal formula that we implement for that.
ChatGPT or other AI tools can help create structure, but they mostly regurgitate for landing pages.
They are not as good at creating content quality that hits all the buttons.
In short, your content needs to draw website visitors in and keep them on the page, following along.
Compare your content to the top-ranking pages and posts and fill the gap.
We suggest using the following SEO tools:
These tools scan your pages and add the appropriate target keywords and LSI keywords to the body, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions so you are comparable to the competition.
To dive deeper, tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs will also show you where you are deficient relative to your competitors and show you how you can close the gap.
Deficiencies could include more than just your written content but might encompass technical SEO like loading speed of the page, keeping in mind that sometimes tunes will indicate page load times should increase (typically because the content page is exhaustive and loads more slowly).
But beware not to over-tune or overoptimize!
Content promotion and link building outreach services are critical, but if your content is epic enough, it will promote itself.
So, if you can make it viral, then others are more likely to link to it, reference it or share it on social media. Just be careful where it is you are acquiring your backlinks from. It's better to get quality than to even touch low-quality links that can drag down your search engine rankings.
While not a direct Google ranking factor, fixing negative Google reviews can help with overall brand perception, particularly if you're in a local market.
Good things come to those who wait, especially in search engine rankings.
We often suggest working less on new sites and putting more time into older, more established sites.
It can be discouraging when new sites don't receive the rankings gains you want, even after a year or two of work.
Be patient. To rank in less than a year is partially based on luck, partially based on lots of input and hard work.
But your time will come if you focus on fundamentals and white-hat SEO strategies.
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