How long does it take to rank in Google?

Every marketer will tell you that getting to the coveted top position on Google search results page doesn’t just happen overnight. But how long then does it really take to rank in Google? The short answer is that it depends, while the long answer involves taking a closer look at what it depends on. This is exactly what a study carried by SEO tool provider Ahrefs has done.

The Ahrefs study first took a look at the average age of top-ranking pages in Google. After analyzing data on the Top 10 ranking pages for each of the 2 million randomly selected keywords, the team at Ahrefs calculated that the average Top 10 ranking page is over 2 years old, while those ranked at No.1 position are almost 3 years old, on average.

As it turned out, just 22% of pages that currently rank in Top 10 were created within 1 year. In other words, the study clearly showed that the Google search results page is dominated by “old” pages.

In order to answer the question of how long it takes for a page to rank in Google, Ahrefs tracked the position history of 2 million random pages that were first seen by their crawler a year ago. If you want to learn what conclusions the Ahrefs team made, check out the comprehensive infographic below by The Website Group.