Most new website owners ask a deeming question – how long does it take to rank my website in Google? Would it rank in three months? Six months? Or do I need to wait for five years to see lucrative results?
Fret not because this blog is intended to enlighten you with facts!
The Cliché Answer: It Depends
So you decided to have a new website built. You spent thousands of dollars and hours creating your own brand – building a website that focuses on your products, services, market, and audience. Last week, you just launched the website, and you’ve had zero visitors to date.
But you are impatient! After all, you are paying your web designer to build a powerful website that will make people click on it in search results.
So what is the time frame of getting my site listed in Google?
It depends on your niche’s competitiveness in Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It also depends on whether you or your web developer added extensive SEO strategies to build your site. So now, let’s check out the real facts.
The Competition and Your Niche AFFECTS How Long It Will Take Before Google Clicks on Your Website
As of January 2022, there were a total of 1.18 billion websites online worldwide. One of these websites is yours! On average, you have at least ten competitors in your niches. Unfortunately, though, there will be sites that are over 100 times bigger than your market. It would be best to keep this in mind when building or creating a website.
These top-ranking websites have been in the industry for several years already. Most of them spent a thousand dollars to accelerate their journey. Some relied on organic search.
Your competition is crucial to identifying your path in the online world. The trick here is to use the blue ocean strategy, a marketing strategy wherein you need to determine the field of less or no competition.
Hence, if you know how to dig this strategy, this could be a good starting point to succeed.
How Does Google Process Website Ranking?
There is no one way to rank your site online. But sure thing, if you know how to use low competition keywords or geo-keywords, your website can be able to see a quick result.
But beyond that, more factors determine how your site will rank than you know, and some of these can be hard to pinpoint directly.
In fact, competition for ranking in search engines has never been higher, so knowing what it takes to rank your site will position you as a leader in your niche.
Google constantly changes how they rank sites with their search algorithm updates (check out Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines). This means they are constantly refining their rankings to produce better results for users. With that being said, there are 200 specific ranking factors that Google looks for when determining site ranking, such as:
- Page Authority: Google’s algorithm looks at how well authoritative pages link to the page trying to rank. These links can be within a 3rd party site, such as your regional directory, or within your own website!
- Page Depth: Google’s algorithm looks at the number of internal links that go into a page. It also applies this concept to inter-page links.
- Link Directionality: Google looks at how the links on your page are pointing — up or down.
And the list goes on. But, of course, these factors depend on the niche you are in and the purpose of your website. Google’s ranking process, in a nutshell, starts with a search engine query looking for products and services.
It then goes through the website, examining page-by-page and analyzing each page’s content to find its true purpose. Google then takes each page’s content and compares it to similar pages on the web.
This is where Google uses both its knowledge of what you would be interested in, along with information from your likes and dislikes from previous searches as well as your browsing history.
How to Rank on Google Depends on a Variety of Factors
Thinking that the only thing your website needs to rank is traffic is a bad idea.
According to Moz, there are five things that Google looks for when ranking websites: content, links from other sites in the SERPs, the user experience (UX), backlinks, and social signals.
Google determines these factors with its search algorithm by finding out which pages on a site have been found most relevant by users. An algorithm is how Google will rank your site.
There are two specifically important ones (that you need to stay on top of) – “natural search” and “authoritative.”
Some factors may appear obvious (like links), while others may be non-obvious (such as backlinks). Backlinks mean that a page has been linked to another page on the internet.
The Key Takeaway
Going back to the question, how long does it take to rank your website? Unfortunately, there is no definite answer. Sometimes, it may take days, months, or years to reach the first page of the search engine result page.
This data is so variable, but here’s a surefire way to achieve your goal – adhere to Google’s webmaster guidelines, create fresh, informative, and timely content and optimize your website. And don’t forget to seek help from SEO experts!
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