One of the best ways to market your business online is to climb the rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) of Google and other search engines. This is a long-term strategy that typically requires weeks to months of effort.
But how long, exactly, does it take to get to your first rank one position? And how can you schedule your strategic choices accordingly?
Why There’s No Short, Succinct Answer
Ideally, we’d all have a custom calendar we could use to pinpoint the exact date we’re projected to hit rank one. But reality isn’t this clean or predictable.
There are simply too many variables for any kind of reliable equation to work. Before you can adequately predict your course to rank one, you'll need to know at least the following:
· Your industry. Different industries have different trajectories for pages ranking up; as you can imagine, some industries are hotly competitive while others are tamer. Generally, the more valuable online organic traffic is for a business, the more competition that business is going to face from other people wanting to dominate the top of the SERPs.
· Your company location. Reaching the top of the rankings for local searches is much easier than doing the same for national searches. Additionally, some locations are more competitive than others. Depending on where your business is and how you're trying to rank, your path to rank one might be very slow or very fast.
· Your budget. How much are you willing to spend to reach rank one? The bigger your budget is, the faster and more reliable your path to ranking up will be. You'll be able to pay for more content, more backlinks, and more forms of marketing and advertising that support your work. With a hypothetically unlimited budget, you can expedite your rise to the top.
· Your target keywords. With better keyword research, you can reach rank one with far more pages. You'll be able to filter out keywords that aren't relevant to your brand, ones that are too highly competitive, and ones with an unreasonably low search volume.
· Your existing DA. What is your current domain authority? The higher your authority, the easier it will be to get new pages to rank.
· Your competition. How much competition do you face? The fiercer and more established your competitors are, the more work you'll have cut out for you.
Even with all these variables properly accounted for, there could be unforeseen developments in your future, such as the addition of a new, powerful competitor, or a change to Google's underlying ranking algorithm.
In other words, even if we could somehow make a perfectly accurate prediction for how long it takes to reach rank one for a particular set of circumstances, those circumstances would likely change and interfere with our prediction.
Ranking Up Takes Time
No matter what, ranking up is something that takes time. Even if you have perfect target keywords, limited competition, and a clear trajectory to the top of the search results, you'll still need to spend time doing the following:
· Developing content. Pages climb the ranks much faster when they're supported by a domain with high authority, but you'll only develop a domain with high authority if you have plenty of content to support it. You'll also need to spend time optimizing excellent content for the page you intend to rank. Many top-ranked domains have dedicated content teams who have full-time jobs developing and refining content for the website.
· Building backlinks. You'll also need to support your page with ample backlinks if you want to maximize its chances of reaching rank one. Building backlinks can be tricky, especially if you want to eliminate the possibility of being penalized, and it requires significant patience.
· Waiting for Google’s index. Even if you have a hypothetically perfect page in place, it's going to take some time for Google’s index to update. Your page may not be immediately discoverable by Google, and it may take time for it to climb the rankings.
Average Rank Up Times
Depending on the variables, you can conceivably hit rank one in 100 days or less. Anecdotally, people have been able to reach rank one in a matter of a few weeks; people have also failed to ever hit rank one. But most people in most situations can expect to hit rank one after a few months of consistent effort.
It takes a long time and a lot of work to reach rank one for any keyword or phrase that has existing competition. And in some cases, it may be practically unfeasible to even make the attempt.
That said, if you know what you're doing, and you're willing to employ patience and perseverance in your work, you can eventually climb to the top of the SERPs.