If you are doing SEO work for a client, I think every new client, without exception, will ask you this question:

"How long will it take before my website ranks in the TOP 10?”

The general answer to this question is of course, “It depends,” on several variables such as: website strength (DA/TF), competition, budget, skills, backlink profile, etc.

But at Ahrefs, they've decided to use the petabytes of historical ranking data they have to give you a slightly more quantifiable answer, something better than just "it depends."

How old are the top pages rankings?

For beginners, they have determined how old the current top pages are.

They took 2 million random keywords and pulled data from the Top10 ranking pages for each of them. That resulted in this beautiful graph:

As you can tell from this graph, the average Top10 ranking page is 2+ years old. And those who rank at position #1 are almost 3 years old (on average).

In fact, only 22% of the pages currently ranking in the Top10 were created within 1 year:

So the next thing they wanted to know is what percentage of pages in each ranking position were less than 1 year old:

This doesn't look too promising, right? The SERP is clearly dominated by “old” pages.

How long does it take for a page to rank in Google?

To answer this question, they randomly selected 2 million pages that saw Ahref's crawler for the first time a year ago.

They then tracked the ranking history of each page for each keyword it ranked for.

Which resulted in this graph:

Only 5,7% of all pages studied ranked in the Top 10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.

Pages from websites with a high domain rating (DR) are better than those with a low DR. That shouldn't surprise you, because Ahrefs'Domain Rating metric (shows the strength of a website's backlink profile) fits in well Google rankings.

They zoomed out about 5,7% of the “lucky” pages to see how quickly they went from nowhere to the Top10.

The majority of them managed to achieve in about 61 to 182 days.

By looking at this graph, you might think that on average it takes a page 2 to 6 months to rank in Google's Top10.

But this conclusion doesn't hold here, because this data only represents the 5,7% of pages that were lucky enough to rank in the Top10 within a year – while almost 95% of all pages we studied didn't make it into the Top 10 within that timeframe.

Only 5,7% of all newly published pages make it to Google Top 10 within a year.

We also calculated the numbers based on monthly search volume of the keywords:

Only 0,3% of pages rank in the Top10 for a high-volume keyword in less than a year.

And here are the dynamics of these 5,7% “happy” pages, broken down by search volume of the keyword they ranked for:

Obviously, you can rank for low volume keywords in a very short time, while high volume keywords will take almost a year to get into the Top10.

But remember, this data only applies to 5,7% of “lucky” pages that ranked in the Top10 within a year. The vast majority of pages don't do that well.

What does this all mean?

Did our study provide a definitive answer to the “how long does it take to rank” question?

No.

But in any case, we have shown that almost 95% of newly published pages do not make it to the Top10 within a year.

And most of the 'lucky' ones who do get in, just about do 2 to 6 months.

Actually, I shouldn't read these pages as 'luck', because the reason they made it to the Top10 in less than a year is probably hard work and good knowledge of SEO, not luck.

So here's to hard work and dedication!

PS: Let us know what you think about our findings and what else would you like us to study.

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This is a translation of an article on Ahrefs.com
The images used come from 123rf or from the Source.