How long does it take to rank for a keyword on Google? There’s no short answer to this question unfortunately because there’s so many factors at play. It can be a matter of weeks or it could take several months to rank a keyword targeted article on Google. Or, you might not rank at all if Google doesn’t recognise your site as an authority and/or there’s a lot of competition. In general though, it’s going to take between 3-6 months if you have a good piece of content and there’s little competition.
If you’re building a niche website around a specific keyword then you may rank sooner. Niche websites can rank for certain keywords quite quickly if there’s very little competition. This can happen within a few weeks. But for content on a blog it will often be longer and take several months.
Google’s SEO algorithm uses several factors to determine whether a site is worthy of a first page or first place listing. Here’s just a few of them:
- Your website’s authority
- Domain age – how old is your site
- Backlinks – how many, where from and which pages to?
- Content on your site & site architecture
- Interlinking from other pages on your site
- Visitor interaction on your website – how long do they stay, where do they go etc.
- Backlink profile – how long has it taken? Is the linking organic?
- Competition will play a huge factor and a hugely competitive keyword is much more difficult to rank for
How Long Does It Take To Rank For A Keyword?
To rank for a keyword on Google, it’s a good idea to focus on finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. The more difficult keywords are usually those which have huge competition on Google. Shorter tail phrases are more in demand and as such you’ll find thousands of competing websites for those particular phrases. Long tail keywords are better if you want free traffic because there’s generally a lot less competition for them.
However, whether your site ranks for them will depend on how you are perceived by Google (and your website visitors). If there’s a lot of competition for a particular keyword, it’s harder for people to find your content and therefore more difficult for Google to rate your site; because it has less data available to make a decision.
A sparsely populated website with only one or two articles will hardly compete with a high authority domain name with tens of thousands of back links. So that’s another consideration. If you want to rank more articles and get more authority, you need more content and more authority backlinks, which can take some time in itself.
Best Way To Rank Content
The best way to rank a piece of content is to start out with some keyword research and find a keyword which is both targeted and has little competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
Use an SEO plugin to help you write your content with the search engines in mind, but write for people. Ultimately it’s going to be the interaction of people on your site which Google uses as an indicator of your content. You can’t “trick” the “bots” into compliance – they’re too clever! So you need to write for people and for the search engine bots too!
Look on Google for the existing top ranked piece of content before you start out and write something which is much better. Write a longer piece which covers the topic in more detail.
Once you’re finished and have published your article, don’t just wait for Google to rank it. Promote it throughout your social media presence and build back links to it. Use social media share buttons and syndication plugins to help automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Use deep linking to link newer content to your keyword targeted articles using the keywords in your copy.
Build your authority at the same time by creating new content regularly building your SEO knowledge and seeking backlinks from other authority websites in your niche.