It takes approximately 1 year, 2 months, 13 days, 4 hours, 23 minutes, and 19 seconds… Come on, you didn’t really take that seriously, did you? The truth is, there isn’t an exact length of time it takes to rank a website. In fact, asking how long it takes to rank a website is like asking how long it takes to fill up your car’s tank, or how long it takes to walk a mile. The answer is: it depends.

• It depends on your website’s current authority.
• It depends on your site’s niche.
• It depends on the keywords you choose.
• It depends on the competition in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• It depends on your tactics.
• It depends on you.

Of course, I’m sure you think that’s not a satisfactory answer, so I’ll go over it in more depth in just a moment.

What Does It Really Mean To Rank In Google?

Before we go any further, there’s seems to be a lot of confusion about what it means to rank in Google. Your site’s rankings are, simply put, where your site is on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a keyword. This could be position 1 or it could be position 100.

However, you’re bound to come across different sites that list their own interpretation of what it means to rank in Google. For example:

1. Some SEOs define ranking as getting your site in the first 3 positions.
2. Other SEOs define ranking as getting your site to at least page 3.
3. I define ranking as getting your website on the first page for a keyword that receives more than 10 searches a month.

In order to keep this simple, let’s just go with my interpretation, as I’m sure you’re here wondering how long it takes to get on the first page anyway.

So How Long Does SEO Take?

There’s a high probability that if you’re asking how long SEO takes to rank your website, you’ve probably never done SEO before, which means you probably aren’t ranking for any keywords yet. So, I’ll be using some posts from this site as an example of how long it takes to rank.

Example 1

Back in late November 2016, I targeted a keyword for my article titled, “Did You Get Bad SEO Advice? Find Out Here!” I posted that article on November 21st, and 9 days later it’s already in position 40. It disappears for a little while and does the little Google dance, then exactly 3 weeks later, it appears again on page 2, and 26 days later it’s in position 13. On January 24th, it made it to the 5th position of page 1.

Example 2

I posted my article titled, “How Much Is My Blog Worth? The Answer’s Not Quite That Easy…” on August 20th. As you can see, the rankings for that page fluctuated quite a bit and it took a little over 5 months to rank on the first page for that article.

Conclusion

These were just 2 examples from one site. I’ve had articles rank in less than a month and I’ve had articles take over a year to rank. Every article on this website used to same old “no building backlinks” tactic I’ve been using since I started this website, so there weren’t as many variables involved.

So, how long does it take to rank in Google? It’s exactly as I said before: It depends.