How long until I reach the first page of Google?

Working at an SEO agency there is always a lot to do; you can never have enough content or enough backlinks. But due to the dynamically changing environment that SEO is it can mean techniques and practices that were popular back in the 90’s become completely outdated today.

For this reason it is very important to stay up to date with the latest SEO techniques and tips. With search engine optimisation there are so many variables it can be difficult to isolate things that are improving results. When you perform SEO on one website you concentrate wholly on it but you don’t get to see that one approach does not fit all.

This is one reason why I enjoy working within an SEO agency because I get to optimise lots of websites and see for myself that every site is different. Each business sector has different levels of competition which has an impact on how quickly results can be achieved.

Some business sectors for example, business telecoms, are mature and this means the websites in this sector are old and have lots of authority in Google. This makes it difficult for newer websites to compete as they are in some cases 13-14 years behind the well established companies in the market. If however you are in a newer industry like mobile phone apps the sites which you are competing against may only be 5 or 6 years old.

How competitive is my industry?

The competitiveness of your industry is one if the main things that will impact how quickly it takes for you to reach the first page of Google. To get an idea of how long it could take you for your chosen words look at page 1 of Google and take a look at the websites that appear. Are the websites well known brands? Use an SEO tool to check the domain age and Page Rank and look at how many backlinks each site has.

The older the domain the more authority the website will have. Again the Page Rank of the website can indicate the authority of the website; more authoritative sites will have higher page rank. If the websites on the first page have many thousands of back links then it will take time for you to catch up.

So you may now be thinking how can I compete with a 5 year old website with 2 thousand back links? It is possible with a high quality link building strategy. This is because a quality link is worth sometimes dozens of low quality links.

Google aims to provide the most relevant information to searchers so it is possible to achieve better rankings than more authoritative sites if the content on your site is more relevant to the search term entered. You can achieve this by having more up to date information on the subject matter. This is why it is important to make sure your site is always up to date.

How long until I reach the first page of Google?

It is difficult to say how long it will take your site to reach the first page of Google because as well as the competitiveness of the keywords you are optimising for it also depends on how much SEO work you do on your site. If you spend a few hours every day you will see faster results than if you spend a few hours each month.

Your website itself can also impact the speed of results and if there are technical issues such as duplicate content, speed load page problems and hidden content this could affect the speed of results.

Each website will take different amounts of time to reach page one of Google but it is possible. If you want to know how long it will take your site to get to the first page of Google contact me know and I can help you to work out an expected time period based on your site and the competitiveness of your industry.