How long does it take to rank in search engines?

They say that if you want to hide a dead body, the best place to do it is in page two of Google search results. Therefore, getting to the top of the search rankings for a chosen key word search remains the dream ticket.

For many smaller businesses, the immediate goal is to get ranked sufficiently highly to have a degree of visibility for potential clients.

Understanding how Google works in principle is a big help: Firstly, the search engine collects information data by using 'spiders' or 'bots' to index all the information. As Google uses over 250 factors to decide on the information hierarchy and ranking order, it's impossible to fully understand the huge complexity of it, but some factors have a stronger influence in the ranking process.  

In order to get ranked requires time and patience – unless you have a huge budget to spend on different techniques – but even then instant results cannot be guaranteed. It is dependent on many other factors besides money and time. The main factors that decide a website's ranking are dependent upon are things such as, budget allowances, website reputation or strength and your positioning in relation to your competitors.

What appears to be a common factor in those sites that rank, particularly those that rank highly is age.  As this post explains in an extensive study, much of the top ranking websites and pages are over two years old, suggesting that credibility of any site or pages is built up over time – as visitors and backlinks are accumulated and trustworthiness grows.

Of course, age is by no means a certainty to ranking: the quality of the site and its content has to be evenly spread out, and things such as blogs are equally as valuable as SEO tricks that will make Google notice the site. 

Only around 6% of pages that are newly-published will make it into rankings – but these have both low-volume keywords and a high domain rating, but even so these can take up to six months to make it into the rankings.

Nevertheless, any business that is serious about increasing its ranking visibility needs a good strategy, careful consideration of SEO techniques – and most importantly a website that has great content to both attract and keep its visitors.