One of the most common questions among website owners is ‘how do I get my website to rank in Google?’ Even after you get familiar with Google ranking factors and optimise your website accordingly, you may still not get the results you want. Google ranking is quite unpredictable, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer; however, thanks to a comprehensive study from Ahrefs, we may be able to give you a more concrete answer after all.
The Ahrefs team first looked at how old the top-ranking pages were, and by taking 2 million random keywords, they were able to pull data on the Top 10 ranking pages for each of them. It turned out that the average Top 10 ranking page is 2+ years old, while those that rank at position #1 are almost 3 years old on average.
To get to the bottom of the main question – how long does it take for a page to rank in Google? – Ahrefs randomly selected 2 million pages that were first seen by their crawler a year ago. They then tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for. The team found that only 5.7% of studied pages listed in the Top 10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword. The majority of these “lucky” pages managed to achieve a top-ranking position in approximately 61 to 182 days.
After breaking down the dynamics of the lucky 5.7% in terms of search volume, it became clear that you can rank for low-volume keywords in a very short time, while the high-volume ones take almost a year to get into the Top 10.
But this only applies to a small fraction of pages, so what about the rest? If you want to find out, take a look at the infographic below by The Website Group and learn more about this important Ahrefs study.
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