One of the questions digital marketers receive all the time is “How long will it take my page to rank in Google?”
Unfortunately, nothing is black and white when it comes to how to rank on Google.
There are simply too many factors to take into consideration.
Even if you do everything by the book, there’s no guarantee that your page will rank in Google any time soon.
A Study on How Long It Takes for SEO to Work
Ranking on Google can be a direct result of a great SEO strategy.
Thus, the question “how long does SEO take?” often coincides with “how long does it take to rank on Google?”
According to a comprehensive study conducted by Ahrefs on how long it takes to rank on Google, only 22% of pages that currently rank in top 10 spots on Google were created within 1 year.
The average top 10 ranking page on Google is 2+ years old.
Meanwhile, the average age of those ranked in the first position is almost 3 years.
Then the Ahrefs team tracked the position history of 2 million randomly selected pages that were first seen by their crawler a year ago.
It turned out that just 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the top 10 search results within 1 year for at least 2 keywords.
The authors of the Ahrefs study calculated the approximate number of days it took this lucky 5.7 % to get on the first page of Google.
They also made some interesting findings about the ranking performance of top 10 sites in terms of keyword volume.
An In-Depth Look at How to Rank on Google
At the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to get on the first page of Google.
The team at Ahrefs, however, has managed to provide a more in-depth insight into the complex mechanism behind Google rankings. To learn more about this study, take a look at the infographic below by The Website Group.
