The classic response would be: it depends.
And in general, it really does! There are tons of variables to consider: website strength, competition, budget, skills, etc.
But at Ahrefs, we decided to sift through our petabytes of historical ranking data and give you something a little more concrete than “it depends”.
How long does it take for a page to rank in Google?
We randomly selected 2 million pages that were first seen by Ahrefs crawler a year ago, then tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for.
These are the results:
Basically, only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.
We then zoomed into 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 to 182 days.
And here are the dynamics of these 5.7% “lucky” pages, broken down by search volume of the keyword that they ranked for:
Clearly, you can rank for low‐volume keywords in a very short time, while the high‐volume ones take almost a year to get into the Top10.
(Remember: this data only applies to the 5.7% of “lucky” pages that ranked in the Top10 within a year. The vast majority of pages don’t perform that well.)
Which means…
Broadly speaking, almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year, and most of the “lucky” ones that do manage it do it in about 2–6 months.
Of course, it helps if you’re targeting low-volume keywords.
There’s your ballpark!
(By the way: if you’re looking to rank in Google quicker, check out these tips.)
