- So how long does it take to see SEO results for a new website? Well, that's a common question I get and I'm going to help you answ...
take to see SEO results
for a new website?
Well, that's a common question I get and I'm going to help you answer it today.
In fact, I'll show you how long it took me to grow one of my niche
website's traffic by 788%.
Let's dive in.
(light music)
So if you're new here,
my name is Nathan Gotch,
and I publish free SEO
training here on YouTube.
So if you want better
rankings and more traffic, please subscribe to my channel and click the bell button to get notified when I publish new trainings.
So with that said, how long does it take to get SEO results for a new website?
Leave a comment below letting me know how long you think it takes to rank.
So back in the day around 2011, 2012, you could rank within 30 days and all you had to do was throw up a decent page,
hit it with some backlinks with exact match anchor text, and you would rank.
Now things are much different now.
SEO has gotten much harder and that's a good thing
because it makes the barrier to entry even harder.
In other words, the more
challenging a skill is to learn, the more valuable it becomes.
And that's why doctors, lawyers, and elite professional
athletes get paid big money.
It's because the barrier to entry is high, so that's why learning SEO is so valuable at this point.
So with that said, in today's SEO world, it takes much longer to get results.
And the exact amount of time will vary based on several factors, which I'm going to explain.
So according to a study by Ahrefs, only 5.7% of all newly published pages will get to Google's Top 10 within a year.
That means a whopping
95% of published pages
get virtually no organic search traffic for at least a year.
Now of course, most pages published on the Internet are not SEO-driven, so that makes sense.
But the real question is, how long does it take to rank if you actually know how to do SEO?
Well, I can only share my experience from working on hundreds of SEO campaigns since 2013.
Now, I could of course just say, - It depends.
- But that's not the answer you want.
The real answer will depend on your level of experience, your ability to execute,
factors relating to your website, and your industry's competition.
Now let me give you a real-life example.
So I've been slowly building a portfolio of online media assets.
In short, my team and I
are creating niche websites with the intention of creating additional revenue streams and with the possibility
of selling these assets
in the future as well.
So we launched one of our first websites on May 23, 2018.
And in one year of the website being live, it reached 816 organic
search visitors per month.
And after two years, it reached 10,122 organic search visitors per month.
So keep in mind, these
numbers mean very little
because it's always going to be industry-dependent.
For example, some industries aren't as competitive
and you can drive lots of traffic, while others are more competitive and it may take longer
to make a dent.
But in my experience on average, you can expect to start seeing SEO results within the first year for a new website.
And you shouldn't expect huge results in the first year, unless you're dedicating a substantial amount of time and effort into it.
So now the question is,
what's the fastest way to start seeing SEO results
for a new website?
Well, here's a simple
seven-step process to follow.
Number one, find low competition keywords.
Now you don't need to hit home runs to win with SEO.
You can do just fine with base hits.
So with the baseball
analogy out of the way,
you need to target keywords that your website is actually capable of ranking for.
And new websites aren't able to rank for competitive keywords in most cases because they don't have
enough website authority.
And authority in this case is defined as the quality and quantity of backlinks that a website has.
So the best way to find
uncompetitive keywords
is to use either SEMrush or Ahrefs.
So just enter your competitors' domain into either of the tools
and then sort your keywords by keyword difficulty.
I recommend going after keywords with low keyword difficulty and with a minimum of
100 searches per month.
Number two, categorize your keywords based on clusters.
It's critical that you
build topical relevance
on your new website as fast as possible.
And the best way to do this is by creating clusters of content.
In short, that means targeting keywords that are topically relevant to each other.
And I'll give you an
example from Gotch SEO.
Gotch SEO has only targeted SEO-related keywords for years, and that's likely the topic Google classifies my site for.
So for Gotch SEO to make
a dent for other topics,
like YouTube SEO, I'll
need to use clusters.
And that's why my team created a cluster of blog posts targeting,
"How to Get 4,000 Watch Hours on YouTube,"
"How Long Does It Take to Get 4,000 Watch Hours on YouTube?"
and even "VidIQ vs
TubeBuddy" and many more.
And the goal is to create topically relevant clusters of content that support each other.
And as a result, the rankings will improve without needing many backlinks.
So number three, build out your first cluster of content.
And I have several videos on my channel showing you how to create SEO content, and I'll have links in
the description below.
Now the key to creating great SEO content isn't about creating something better.
It's about creating something different while satisfying the search intent for that target keyword.
Number four, optimize your content the right way.
Now most people think of on-page SEO as just placing some keywords and then you're good to go.
However, there is much
more to it than that.
That's why I created a dedicated video showing you my 80-point
On-Page SEO Checklist,
and I'll have a link below this video.
That said, you can also streamline your on-page SEO efforts
by using a tool like Surfer.
So here's how my team's workflow looks when we create SEO content.
First, run the target
keyword through Surfer
to find keyword variations and the target word count.
Then create an SEO content brief, which describes the content angle, word count target, and keyword variations.
Next, assign the project to a writer.
After that, run the draft through Hemingway Writer
to improve the quality of the writing, and then run the second
draft through Grammarly
for another upgrade on quality.
And lastly, run the content through Surfer to make sure it's optimized well out of the gate.
And now the fifth step
for getting SEO results
with a new website is to create an intelligent architecture for your cluster.
So once you've created and published all of your clusters, you need to make sure
you've linked them together.
And I recommend using
exact match anchor text
with all of your internal links.
Now each page in the cluster should link to each other if it makes sense.
Number six, acquire backlinks.
So you can nail the first five steps of this process like a pro, but you'll
struggle without backlinks.
And that's because backlinks are the fuel on the fire
you need to improve your rankings.
Now I have a dedicated video below showing you 19 link-building techniques you can use for a new website.
Which brings me to the
final step in this process, which is number seven, to use Phantom Link Building.
And I published this
technique on my Gotch SEO blog a few months ago, but
it's an amazing method
for building backlinks to a new website.
In short, you can build the authority of your website without hitting it directly with links.
So here's how it works.
Only acquire the best
backlinks you can on tier one and then drive backlinks to those tier one placements.
And I recommend keeping
the quality of your links on each tier very, very high.
And that's the big difference between Phantom Link Building and traditional tier links is the quality of the links on each level.
With Phantom Link Building, you're building editorial links at each step of the process.
And to give you an example of how well this works,
check out Gotch SEO's rankings for PaperRater and Paperform.
I used this exact technique for both of these pages.
So to recap, it takes at
least one to two years
to see SEO results, as long as you follow a proven process.
And you can cut that time in half, depending on the amount
of effort and investment
you're putting into your SEO campaign.
So if you enjoyed this
video, please like it
and subscribe to my channel.
And hit the bell button
because you get first access to any new training that I publish.
