Back in 2014, doing SEO was called easy mode. We used to test the competitiveness of certain niches by building a skeleton site. Skeleton site had a home page with 300 words of content. You put the keyword in the title, once in the first paragraph and once in H2. Then add a photo or youtube video on it for good measure. After that you send a strong backlink directly to the single page website. In 3 days, you are on the 1st page of google. As there were no advanced technologies and not many websites, ranking in this era was simple.
Now in 2022 things are a lot advance and different for plenty of reasons.
Reason 1- The Google Sandbox : The sandbox is like a chain that is placed on new websites that prevents them from ranking. Lets see how, whenever people start a website, they come up with a bunch of keyword research. They will start to target non competitive keywords with literally zero competition and start on page billion of google. This is a sandbox.
Reason 2- More Competition : The competition has increased in billions over the past few decades. There are thousands of websites writing about the same niche as you are. So to get your place in google you need to be expert in Search Engine Optimization.
Reason 3- Content Requirement : Another reason it takes longer to get SEO results today is because the amount of content is required in today’s google environment. If you are trying to get on the top of google, it’s not enough to write a single article about your niche. Even if it’s the best article in the world, it’s not gonna work. Google wants websites to answer multiple questions about your product/ service in multiple articles. This concept is called topical authority. When you cover all the topics, google rewards you because you’ve become an authority on that topic.
Reason 4- Backlink Requirement : Last reason why SEO takes longer these days is because of backlinks. A backlink links one site to another with a textual or image link. Back in 2001, Google founder Larry Page gave detailed information on how Google was gonna rely heavily on backlinks to determine ranking in search results.
How long does it take for a website to get visible in Google?
Most of the websites start to turn the corner within 6- 12 months. Sometimes you get lucky if it starts working out in 6 months.
But ultimately, how long it takes to get to the top of google depends on a few factors. And those factors will adjust the time it takes for SEO to boost up.
- The Google Sandbox typically lasts 2-4 months. If you can avoid google sandbox or shorten its duration you can expect to get 5k traffic in 1-6 months.
- Level of competition you face is a huge factor on how long it takes for SEO to work. If you straight go for a high competition keyword and try to rank on day one, this will extend the time to more than 2 years for the results. But if you start with low competition and long tail keywords, each of them adds to your overall website traffic. If you do this correctly and publish fast, you will speed results within 6-12 months. If you start localising your keywords to your area, you’re gonna get traffic faster. Enough local keywords can get you 5k traffic in 6-12 months. Likewise if you take your SEO to foreign countries, the competition might be low but not search traffic. Choosing the right foreign countries can reduce the time to 6-12 month range.
The Factors that make the most difference is your SEO method. What types and techniques you use can give you results in less than a month.
- Avoid the google sandbox
The first strategy is to do whatever you can to avoid or reduce the amount of time you’re stuck in google sandbox. Sandbox exists for 2 reasons, first, you don’t have any link authority. Second, because you haven’t built any trust yet.
- Topical authority launch
It is a launch of a website with a ton of content that’s topically relevant to your niche. This process starts with creating a topical map. You need to do research to figure out every piece of content that requires topical authority in your niche. You can get content ideas for free by the people also ask section, google’s autocomplete function, related searches and intuition.
- Avalanche technique
There is a concept called traffic tiers. Depending on how much traffic you have in your site, you’re able to rank for certain keywords on your tire easily. The key here is which keyword to start with?
- Fully Optimised Content
If every article on your site is perfectly optimised, you will rank very quickly. A lot of people think that if you just write content that’s good, google will notice and push you to the top of the results. Google is a robot, an algorithm. It can’t read your content. What it does instead is looks for certain words, entities and phrases in various places in your content. It checks your content against the other article on page one for that keyword and compares you on factors such as word count, keyword placement, related words and entities, word frequency and many more.
- Expired Domains
Instead of starting your website with a brand new domain with no backlink, start it on an aged domain with lots of backlink.
- 301 redirects
It’s a quick way to instantly build a ton of links to your site in a natural way. A 301 is what you tell google that domain A doesn’t exist anymore. It now lives at domain B. so send all the backlinks from A to B.
- Private Blog Network (PBN) links
PBN stands for private blog network. PBNs are expired domains with tons of backlinks that were brought back to life. When you get a link from one of these things, you typically get one from the home page. That’s an insane amount of power coming from a single link, which at the right amount, can shoot your website up to search ranking.
