Essential Marketer

One thing we often discuss with clients is the length of time it takes to attain a certain level in Google. As many SEO companies will charge a monthly fee it’s understandable that some clients may feel the length of time is overstated for financial reasons.

Recently the Search Engine Roundtable, who monitor and track the search engine industry recently ran a poll on time to rank well. The results reiterate a long held belief that it can take months before a site will rank well.

• 3 - 6 Months said 83 respondents or 35%
• 6 - 9 Months said 46 respondents or 19%
• 2 Months said 28 respondents or 12%
• A Year Plus said 24 respondents or 10%
• Weeks said 22 respondents or 9%
• A Year said 13 respondents or 5%
• A Month said 13 respondents or 5%
• Other answer… said 10 respondents or 4%

Why Does It Take Months?

A valid question and one we will try to answer. Although no one truly knows how Google or the other search engines work we are able to extrapolate based on the years of experience on our own and clients sites.

You will often find all search engines will be quick to index your site but won’t begin to show you in the results for some weeks or even months. All the search engines have a huge array of filters, analysis algorithms and other methods of detecting the validity and quality of a site. Although they have huge resources to number crunch this data the algorithms themselves monitor sites over time. This could be seen as their way of ensuring you have ’staying power’ and aren’t just a ‘fly-by-night’ spam site (or page) that are often set up for quick and dirty money-making scams.

Why the Up And Down?

Many clients have also noticed that results won’t just go up but will also drop significant amounts before recovering at a later date. We’ve noticed this occurs for a few days to a week and is always temporary. One example was a client who had a strong position of 7 within two weeks but in the fourth week dropped to position 152. As you can imagine this caused some panic but we can now say the client is perfectly happy with their position 4 and we firmly believe it will continue to reach no.1 spot in 3-4 more weeks.

We believe Google will ‘experiment’ by artificially inflating a sites position for a short period before dropping it again and their algorithm will assess the popularity and bounce rate of that result during its inflated period. This is another part of the complex testing Google and other search engines will carry out to effectively place your site in the results. We’ve noticed this more with Google than any of the other search engines and it can occur up to 3 and 4 times before finally settling on the first page. These ‘inflated’ positions are a good indicator of where the site will eventually stabalise at.