How Long To Rank On Google?

Let me confirm there is no certain way to rank your website high on Google. Neither can anyone tell you how long it will take to get to the first pages of the Google SERP’s. However, from my experience on the SEO arena, there are some key factors that come into play. These factors are what I will try to explain in this article.

Google Ranking Factors

Google has stated many times that they are currently using over 250 factors to place web pages at their chosen positions. The algorithm is complex yet effective at sifting out the good content from the bad. This makes Google the number one used search engine in the USA and UK. The most important factors for ranking a website high in the SERP’s are the following.

Age Of Domain

A website domain that is matured and trusted will have more credibility in the eyes of Google than one that is new. Authority websites will always perform better in the SERP’s than a new website will. New websites can enjoy high rankings but it will take a lot more time to achieve.

Rule of thumb is that a website is considered new for six months. Once the domain is older than six months you can start getting some serious traction on Google.

No Penalties

If you have been employing black hat SEO techniques on your website in an attempt to rank higher quicker. It is very likely that you have a manual or algorithmic penalty.

How can you find out if you have a penalty?

1, Login or register with Google webmaster tools. Go to the dashboard – select “manual actions”. From there you can find out if your website has any manual penalty’s for web spam.

2, To check for algorithmic penalty’s, login or create a Google Analytics account. From here navigate to the traffic sources report. From here change the date range to around six months before the major drop in traffic you may have noticed. Now look for any drastic changes in click throughs to the website. This can be helpful with pin-pointing the date any traffic loss was received. You can then try to recover any bad links or other SEO techniques that were performed on your site around those dates.

Keyword Competition

There are normally hundreds if not thousands of web pages competing for the same keywords. If you have a new website you should be selective of which keywords you choose.

If you choose a popular keyword the reality is you will not show very high on the SERP’s. Mainly because you have a new website which is not classed as an authority site. If however, your website is an authority site you stand a good chance of ranking high.

It is recommended if your website is new, to choose keywords that have low competition or use long tail keywords. This could be the best plan of action as a high ranking low competition web page will get traffic and links. This will increase your websites reputation helping it to achieve higher rankings for more popular keywords in the future.

Type Of Content

The type of content is a major player in how quickly Google ranks web pages. A real-time breaking news article will rank a lot quicker than an article that is not considered as news. For instance, an article about a natural disaster that has just happened somewhere in the world will be ranked a lot quicker than an article about how to fit a new clutch to your car. This will also depend on how the article is written and the word count.

Page Titles

An accurate page title which accurately describes the web page’s content is crucial. When creating page titles it is important to keep them short but descriptive. If too long Google will only show a snippet of the text or it will make it’s own title for the page in the SERP’s.

Create Interesting Content

As once said and I think it is still said by Google “content is King”. It does not matter how many authority websites link to your web page if you do not have good, original and interesting content for your users to read. Users no what good content is and when they find it, they are more likely to share your content with other users. Users tend to share through social media, blogs, email or other forms. It is this natural SEO which builds your websites reputation. This type of reputation can rarely be built without quality content.

SEO

On page and off page SEO is crucial for ranking your website high in the SERPS. If you are serious about your business SEO is a must.

Links

A web page that receives a lot of organic back-links is considered by the search engines as important. It is also a major factor for boosting your web pages in the SERP’s.

Publish New Content

It is important to publish new content on your website frequently. This is because Google is always searching the internet for important web pages. If you publish new content every couple of days Google will start to notice that your website is becoming quite active. Google will then start to spider your website more often till eventually any new content published will be added to the SERP’s almost immediately. This can be very useful if you run a news website or similar.

Top Tips

1, Try to be patient when you are trying to rank higher on Google. It is not a race and if it were the tortoise would win hands down. From experience, a website that performs positively in the SERP’s very quickly tends to be too good to be true. These sites are usually SEO’d unethically and employ a host of black hat SEO tactics.

2, Find a good SEO company who can explain to you how they work. You do not want to employ any Mystique Megs here. Your website is your businesses shop window and if it is not SEO’d as per the Google guidelines it will almost defiantly receive a penalty. This penalty could plunder your website to the depths of the SERP’s.

Social Media

If your business is the type that will flourish by using social media, it is worth spending some time creating social signals.

Conclusion

With most things it takes time to build a good quality foundation, this is the same for building a high traffic website. If your website is new it could take up to six months before you see any visits from Google. Rest assured, if you put in the hard work or release marketing budgets for an SEO company. You can start to receive more positive results from Google.

In a nut-shell do not give up, keep going and all of your hard work will come good in the end.