The common response to this question is obviously, “It depends,” because there are just too many variables to consider: website strength, competition, budget, skills, etc. But here at Ahrefs, we decided to sift through the petabytes of historical ranking data that we have and give you a slightly more quantifiable answer, How long something more concrete than simply, “It depends.” Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword. Pages from websites with a high Domain Rating (DR) performed way better than those with a low DR.
Which shouldn’t come
As a surprise, because Ahrefs’ Domain Rating metric (shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile) correlates well with Google rankings. We then zoomed into company data these 5.7% of “lucky” pages to see how quickly they got from nowhere to the Top10. The majority of them managed to achieve that in approximately 61-182 days. By looking at this graph, you might think that, on average, it takes a page anywhere from 2-6 months to rank in Google’s Top10. But that conclusion isn’t valid 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 the pages we studied didn’t make it to the Top10 within that timeframe.
We also re-calculated
The numbers based on monthly search volume of the keywords. Clearly, you can rank for low-volume keywords in. A very short time, while the high-volume. Ones take Fax List almost a year to get into the Top10. But again, don’t forget that 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 perform that well. What does this all mean? Did our study give a definite answer to “how long does it take to rank” question? No.
But at least we’ve shown that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year. And most of the “lucky” ones, which do manage to get there, do it in about 2-6 months. Actually, I shouldn’t be framing these pages as “lucky,” because the reason they got to the Top10 in less than a year is most likely hard work and great knowledge of SEO, not luck.