Study: What it takes to rank

Placing your content on the first page is the best way to drive organic traffic to your site. Websites that invest in SEO from the start get more than 4,000 visits in the first year. And the sites that don’t do this get 0 and lose the potential to gain more and more presence over time.

How do we know that? We analyzed more than 28,000 new websites and what they achieved in a year.

This article covers all of our top findings, and provides guidance on how you can use this data to create your own successful SEO strategy.

How long does it take to rank in Google: statistics and key findings

• Out of the 28,000 domains we studied, only 7.65% content ranked in the top 100 for the entire duration of the study (13 months).
• Almost all (92.3%) of the domains that ranked in the top 100 for all 13 months had at least one backlink
• By the 6th month, only 19% of the domains started ranking in the top 10 and maintained there until the end of the period
• 55.1% of domains that failed to make the top 10 had no backlinks
• The average length of keywords for the top 10% of websites ranges from 3.2 to 3.5 words.
• Longer content performed better—content ranking in the top positions averaged 3.5 times longer than other lower positions
• Domains in the top positions generally maintained better site health, compared to lower ranked sites

Methodology: How we collected our data

To find subjects for this study, we selected 28,000 random domains that had never appeared in Semrush’s US database before...