How Long Does SEO Take To Rank My Website On Page One?

How Long To Rank A Local Business With Organic SEO on Page One

OK, so you’ve got the general idea of SEO and that this is the Number 1 way to ensure that you get onto the first page of a potential client’s or customer’s search results, whether this is on Google or some other search engine. We won’t count paid ads, as quite a few customers ignore these unless they happen to be absolutely and precisely what they’re looking for, which isn’t always the case. Organic traffic is what really counts and this is the ranking that most business owners and entrepreneurs are interested in.

Well, so how long will it take a local business to rank well above his competitors on page one of the search engines, mainly the Big G?

However, once you’ve put a website together and started things off with a friendly SEO expert, then how long will it take before you see your site turning up there on Page One of the Google search results?

By the way, in this article, we will refer to Google when we talk about search engines and page rankings because this is by far the most common one used out there. Yes, there are other search engines out there but we also know that Google is king of the search engines. It’s also got the best known algorithms and probably the biggest collection of commonly used search terms and keywords. What works for Google will work for all the lesser minions… oops, I mean other search engines.

Anyway, back to the question as to how long it will take before your business website turns up on the first page of the search results. Like the answer to many other questions, the answer isn’t just a simple number pulled out of the air. Honestly, I’m not hedging or trying to stall when I give the answer “It depends,” to your burning question about how long it’s going to take.

There are a lot of factors out there than influence how long it will take before you get the ranking results you want and need. Keeping the concept of organic traffic and organic results in mind, you could try thinking of what’s happening like growing a garden. You plant the right seeds and provide the right amount of fertiliser and water but there are still plenty of other factors that influence how long it’s going to take before the seeds come up and start producing what you want. What’s more, as anybody who’s had a go at growing a garden knows, the organic way may take a little longer but the results are so much better!

Here is a Short Case Study About The Ranking Journey of Our Own Website London SEO Guy

Some 5 months ago we started working on this new project called LondonSEOGuy.co.uk. Exciting new website for my agency helping local businesses. 4 and a half months ago we were ranking on position 126 in Google. Today, 7th November 2019 we are No.2 on top of nearly 80m other webpages.

Nick's secret sauce formula did the job again.

London SEO Guy rankings
SEO company London ranking at the top of page one

Achieving position No.2 for such a competitive word as "London SEO' within a 4.5 month period is an achievement we are proud of. 

The Main Factors Contributing to the SEO Ranking Schedule

Sure, good things take time but as a business, you want to see results and a good return on investment fairly promptly rather than goodness knows how many years down the track. To get the SEO ranking timetable hustling along so you can get the views, clicks and interactions you need, there are a few factors that you need to get right. Think of these as the fertiliser needed to grow your online presence.

Some of the factors are on-page factors and the others are off-page factors. The really good news is that the on-page factors are all completely in your control. Off-page factors that boost your SEO ranking are a bit fiddlier to get working in your favour, but this is where a good SEO expert can help you out, as this is the sort of thing that they know back to front and sideways. To keep the gardening metaphor going, you can think of an SEO consultant as being the professional gardener or the knowledgeable old guy next door who takes a look at the soil, shakes his head and tells you to add a generous dressing of gypsum.

Just to clarify, the on-page factors are the things that you have on your website – the content that you create. Off-page factors are the things that happen on other sites managed by others.

On-Page Factors That Speed Up Ranking

Getting the on-page factors right to maximise your SEO and get your site up there on the page rankings isn’t actually all that hard. The good news is that Google’s algorithms are designed to think like your potential customers and will reward the sort of features and content that make your site more user-friendly. When you get down to it, it’s just plain old-fashioned customer service and creating trust between you and your customers – something that has been essential for business success since well before the invention of the internet and even before the invention of electricity. Back in prehistoric days, Thag the Caveman was more likely to barter those newly knapped flint arrowheads for a mammoth hide from the chatty hunter who folded up the hide nicely and pointed out the weak spots rather than the one who just grunted and shoved the hide over.

The best on-page factors that speed up your ranking are the following:

  • Fantastic content. You have to provide the sort of content that people want to read. This means that it has to be well-written rather than gobbledygook, and it has to be informative, pertinent and useful. Telling your customers what they need to know as well as a heap of useful bits and pieces does more than just boost your rankings – it also helps to improve your relationship with your customers so they keep coming back for more. If your content is sketchy, badly written and/or incomplete, then you’re likely to irritate people and they won’t be customers at all.
  • Content optimisation. You need to get the right keywords – that’s a must. However, you also need to put them in the right places, such as headings and titles, and use plenty of variations on them throughout your content… without sounding weird. It’s an art form…
  • Navigation and inner linking. If your customers can find where they need to go on your site really easily and you’ve got lots of links from one page to another (e.g. from your product descriptions to your contact page), this makes it really easy for them to do business with you AND it boosts your Google page rankings.
  • Outbound links. A simple but often overlooked trick is to have a link from your site to another site. However, it has to be somewhere relevant and authoritative that’s got something to do with your site. Customers like this, as it shows that you know something about what you’re talking about, and Google rewards it, too. (hint: there’s published scientific research on just about every topic you can think of!).
  • Image optimisation. You know those little snippets that turn up where an image ought to be if a page doesn’t load correctly? This alt text for images makes things helpful for users and gives you the chance to sneak in a keyword or so.

Other on-page factors that help increase your visibility online relate to site design and technical bits rather than plain content. Being mobile-friendly, having a faster load speed, not having duplicate content, getting metadata and image alt text right, and not having broken links all count big-time for the quality of your site and Google is looking for this sort of thing when it evaluates sites for quality… which counts for rankings.

Off-Page Factors

Google has always rewarded inbound links – links from other sites to yours. Thankfully, the days of link farms and spammy sites are gone and get penalised, but inbound links are serious Google juice. This is the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth: when people tell other people about you and your site. The importance of bloggers, Instagrammers and social media influencers is on the rise, as customers trust them, so if you can get one of these on your side and linking to you, good for you! You want inbound links that are trustworthy and, preferably, organic rather than forced.

This is just scratching the surface, of course. However, if you want to increase your online visibility and get your site soaring up the rankings so that it can land on Page 1, then have a talk to us and we’ll see how we can help you.

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Our agency is one of the highest ranking on Google's page one for competitive terms such as "London SEO" (80,000,000 competing web pages). We are helping local businesses around the world to achieve their dreams by exploding their client enquiries through organic traffic. For a quick consultation get in touch via the contact page on https://londonseoguy.co.uk or call us on 020 3137 8017​. We  are working hard for your success, why wait - get clicking now!