How Long Does It Take To Rank on Google?
Website developers spend a lot of time trying to make sure their pages show up directly beneath that box, at the top of Google’s first page of search results.
Reaching the top of the search rankings does not happen overnight, especially for small businesses with little or no existing web presence.
According to multiple sources, the average time for websites to rank on Google through optimization (SEO) techniques is about three to six months.
That’s right – jumping to the front of Google’s results usually takes between 90-180 days, depending on the competitiveness of your industry and the popularity of your keywords. For several reasons we’ll discuss below (competition, domain age, content accumulation, etc.) a high ranking may take as much as a year in competitive fields.
This can be frustrating for developers and clients alike. We just put weeks into building a new site! It looks great and no one is seeing it! Why isn’t Google recognizing us?
Don’t worry. In this case, doing everything right doesn’t mean immediate results. Ranking on Google is a process, not a magic trick.
To understand which websites appear at the top of Google‘s rankings, first, we need to dive into how Google finds those pages and adds them to your search results.
How Does Google Find My Page?
Software programs called “Googlebots” (also known as bots, robots, or spiders) move or “crawl” through billions of web pages, collecting and cataloging information that is added to Google’s index of the web. For your webpage to reach Google’s index, the spiders must be able to crawl and read the information on your site.
The algorithm considers more than 250 factors, including keywords, titles, and content tags. The algorithm also incorporates PageRank, a separate program that measures each page’s importance according to the amount and quality of traffic from other sites.