01 Nov How Long Does It Tale To Rank On Google?
How Long Does It Take for a New Website to Rank on Google?
There is no universal answer here, but there is a straightforward method using which it is possible to increase the rank of a new webpage. It is more of using the right SEO strategy, using data-driven SEO for gaining a rank boost.
Let’s know the ‘how’ part of it using an interesting case study by Ahrefs. According to Ahrefs, on average, the majority of top-ranking pages are more than two years old. It also found that if the Domain Rating (DR) of a page is high, indicating the overall strength of the backlink profile of a website; that page performs better than those with a lower DR.
Further, keywords with a lower search volume rank more quickly, as their competition is low. Generally, websites having a robust link profile consistently tend to rank more quickly than those with weak ones.
This post is dedicated to these findings from the ahrefs tool, although similar results are available from other search tools such as MOZ and SEMrush.
Ahrefs Study: The Digital Age of Top-ranking Pages
In the beginning, Ahrefs attempted to discover the age of the current top-ranking pages. To do so, it randomly selected two million keywords and fetched data on the top 10 pages for each of them.
This gave them a graph indicating that such pages, on average, are older than two years. Further, those in the first position are almost three years old on average. Indeed, just 22% of pages in the top 10 were less than one year old.
Then, Ahrefs focused on determining the percentage of pages at each rank that was less than a year old.
Well, the old pages seem to dominate Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Ahrefs Study: Time Taken for a Page to Rank in Google
To find this out, Ahrefs casually sampled two million pages. Well, these were the pages that an Ahrefs crawler had spotted a year ago. Next, for each page, Ahrefs tracked the position record for any keyword that the page specifically ranked for. This gave the following graph:
As per this graph, just 5.7% of all examined pages were in the top 10 results for at least one keyword in one year. The graph also indicated that the webpages from websites having a high DR performed far better than those with a low one.
The next step Ahrefs took was to dig deep into these 5.7% pages to find out how fast they got to the top 10. It found that the majority achieved that position in around 61 to 182 days.
Note: The graph results are only for the fortunate 5.7% pages; the rest did not accomplish the same outcomes and rankings in that duration.
Based on the keywords’ monthly search volume, Ahrefs recomputed the numbers.
It concluded that just 0.3% of the pages ranked in the top 10 within a year for a high-volume keyword.
Below are the subtleties of the 5.7% pages, the split based on the search volume of their ranking keyword:
It is evident that it is possible to rank for low‐volume keywords in a short time, while those having a high search volume take nearly a year to be a part of the top 10 list.
Still, this applies to only 5.7% of the fortunate pages that got a position in the top 10 in a year. Most webpages are less likely to perform this well.
Conclusion
From this case study, it is clear that most webpages are less likely to come into the top 10 search result list within the first year. Based on the topic, it is likely to take both patience and time for a webpage to gain a high rank.
