How Long Does It Take To Rank for Keywords?
SEO is a long-term game that requires patience and consistency. When starting with SEO, it’s important to understand that Google’s algorithm favors websites that have built authority over time. This means that you need to prove your website’s worthiness to receive traffic from customers.
Several factors determine your website’s authority, including its age, the quality of content, the number and quality of backlinks, and technical aspects of the website. These factors accumulate over time, which is why SEO takes time.
The length of time it takes to rank for your keywords depends on three factors:
- How quickly you build authority
- The competitiveness of the SEO market you’re targeting
- Avoiding anything that Google doesn’t like
The second factor is particularly important. The more people search for a keyword, the more competitive it is, and the longer it will take to rank for it. For this reason, we always recommend small businesses to write blogs that target less competitive keywords.
Here are some general timescales for SEO:
- If you write a good blog, you can expect to start driving traffic to that blog within 1-2 months.
- If you optimize a product/service/homepage with a low-competition keyword, you can expect to rank within 3-6 months.
- If you optimize a product/service/homepage with a medium-competition keyword, you can expect to rank within 6-12 months.
- If you optimize a product/service/homepage with a high-competition keyword, you can expect to rank within 12+ months.
It’s important to note that these are general timescales and not guaranteed. Your website’s performance depends on the quality and quantity of SEO you do and the amount of SEO completed previously. The more SEO actions you complete, the quicker and better your website will perform.
