How Soon Can a New Website Rank?

So you just launched a new website. You’ve been working on filling it out and creating great content, but you still are getting next-to-no organic traffic. What gives? Well, it turns out that where a website ranks in search engine result pages has a lot to do with time. So, how soon can a new website rank?

According to ahrefs, who crawls nearly as many pages as Google, the average page ranking in the Top 10 of search engine results is at least 2 years old. In fact, only 22% of pages that currently rank in the Top 10 were created within 1 year. And to give you even more perspective, pages in the #1 spot are, on average, almost 3 years old.

So this means two main things:

1. Don’t get discouraged if you aren’t ranking yet, these things take time!
2. Start your SEO strategy as soon as possible. The sooner you start, the sooner you rank.

Factors of How Websites Rank

It is possible to rank earlier or later than 2 years because of the many factors that go into SEO. Pay close attention if you are determined to rank in your first year.

Competition

When working to rank in search engines, you are essentially just trying to beat those attempting to rank for the same keywords. If your competition is stiff, it can take more than 2 years for your website to rank, and less if your keywords don’t have a lot of competition.

A way to work around this is to pick easy-to-get keywords while your website is young. Continue building towards those big keywords with lots of traffic and lots of competition, but also make sure you go after some easier, possibly only loosely relevant keywords. This will make sure you get at least some traffic in your first year.

The Quality of Your website

Do you have a lot of broken links, pages without meta descriptions, or hardly any content? Making sure your website is well-built and well-maintained is a big factor in how soon you can rank. It’s important that users who reach your website don’t leave immediately because of a bad website. Search engines will notice a high bounce rate and penalize you for it.

Updating your content regularly and adding new pages consistently is key to SEO. The larger your website becomes over time the sooner one or more of those pages can rank. When you write content for your website and new pages, be sure they are keyworded well. Do your research and work the keywords in naturally.

Don’t Try to “Cheat” Search Engines

Perhaps you think you found a loophole or someone told you about a sneaky strategy to get to the top page of search results. Don’t waste your time on any methods to try and “game” the system. Google and others will catch on (usually pretty soon) and close the loophole. They are never left open for long, and maybe you can get to the first page for a day or two, but once they notice not only will you be back where you started, but you might even be worse off. Search engines now see your website as spammy and untrustworthy and it will take even longer to gain their trust back.

Using a good old content marketing strategy and SEO to build up your website is the best method to one day have a website that will bring in huge numbers of daily organic traffic. Organic traffic is incredibly sustainable. It might take time and effort to reach the front page of SERPs, but once you are there, you will have more traffic coming in than you will know what to do with.