How Long Will it Take to Rank Well in Google?

Indexing your Content

Before your website can rank for any keyword, Google needs to add it to their index. To do so, Google will send a bot, also known as a spider, to read your website's pages and after that, the pages are added to Google's index. There is no way to guarantee, if or when, Google crawls your website, but you can increase your chances by making it easier to index your content. The first step is making sure there are no broken links and that the HTML code is clean and standards compliant. Implement a site map and register your website with Google Webmaster Tools to submit the site map to Google.

Google is known to give priority to established websites versus new ones. Positioning a brand new website in a competitive market with older competitors can take a significantly longer time than positioning a website that has been around for a few years. Domain registration age and duration are also considered by Google as hints about the worth of a website, so when you are registering your domain do so as early as you can and for the longest number of years available at your domain registrar.

Ranking for a keyword that is extremely competitive will take more effort and time than if the keyword has little or no established competition. Look at the websites that currently hold the first page results in Google for a search on that keyword. If they are old and established websites with many inbound links and a high page-rank you may be looking at several months before your SEO efforts give results.

A website with many inbound links will generally rank higher and more quickly on Google. There are two main reasons for this: Google considers each inbound link as a vote from the originating website for the target website, and Google's spiders will index your content quicker if they find it by following a link from a respected website. The increase in traffic due to visitors coming from those links can also have an effect, although that has not been confirmed. If you want to reduce the time it takes for your website to rank in Google, it is worth investing part of your time on a link-building campaign.

If your website is not appearing in the Google index for a specific keyword after two weeks, take steps to figure out why. The best way to see if there is any problem with your website is signing up to Google Webmaster Tools to get an overview of what Google sees and thinks about your website. Once Google indexes your website, monitor your keywords each week and see if their rank is increasing or decreasing to be able to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly, for example by increasing your link-building efforts or writing new content.