How Long Time to Rank a New Blog Post?

The objective of SEO is to rank high to get more eyes on your blog content. But what if your blog post isn’t ranking after several days or months? Could something be wrong somewhere?

Many bloggers often wonder how much time Google and other search engines take to rank newly published blogs.

The short answer — it depends.

Huh!

Well, how long time to rank a new blog post is subject to many variables, including domain rating, competition, and optimization skills.

To be more specific;

One study involving 2 million randomly selected pages showed that about 5.7% of new posts get to the Top10 within 12 months. On average, most of these pages take 2 to 6 months to claim the top rankings.

How Blog Post Ranking Works

Google is an intelligent answering machine. It relies on robots known as spiders to crawl newly published or updated content. Spiders discover blog and web content through URLs and links.

If the search engine finds your content valuable enough to relevant query searches, it will process and store information in its database. That’s indexing.

Indexing can take a few days, weeks, or even months.

An indexed blog post is then put up against similar pieces of content. The position it will hold in the search engine results pages (SERPs) depends on how best it answers a search query.

As you can see, there is a difference between ranking and ranking well. Your post could be on page 20. Unfortunately, no user is going to click through to page 20.

If your post can’t appear on the first page, then it’s the same as not ranking at all. Findings from one study indicate that 67.60% of web users visit the first five pages. Those sites holding positions 6 to 10 receive 3.73% of all clicks.

How to Make Blog Posts Rank Faster

While this is not something you’re entirely in control of, there are a few choices you can make to improve the process.

You don’t have to sit back and wait for the system to attempt to find your content and index it. This passive approach takes time.

Here’s what you will do to make your new content discoverable by search engines:

1. Submit the new URLs to the search engines

For example, with Google, you submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.

You can also add your sitemap to the robots.txt file. Well, this works not only on Google but also on Bingo and Yahoo.

2. Optimize your URLs

Ensure your URLs are well organized, as this allows the bots or spiders to crawl your content faster and thoroughly. You can optimize your URL with the following tips:

  • Keep the URLs simple. Use words that readers can easily understand and remember. Search engines prioritize relevant, compelling, and accurate URLs.
  • Keep your URLs short.
  • Use keywords in the URLs.
  • Make each piece of content accessible via one URL.
  • Use hyphens to separate words within the URL to increase readability.
  • Remove URL parameters. They split page ranking signals, waste crawl budget, and create duplicate content.
  • Disallow all the actions which the crawler can’t perform. For example, you could disable the contact forms, login pages, and shopping carts.

3. Internal linking and backlinking

As mentioned earlier, search engines also use links to discover newly published content. The internal links help show the relevance, relationship, and value of pages. They give crawlers an idea of the structure and hierarchy of your website.

Without internal links, a page is considered an orphan. Such a page usually doesn’t rank well on the search engine results pages.

You can use the XML sitemap on your blog to identify pages without links.

When doing internal linking, it’s advisable not to use nofollow tags on your links. The problem with this linking strategy is that, once the bots come across the links, they send signals to search engines to drop the link from its indexing database.

Backlinks are also critical in the ranking of blog posts. Getting a vote of confidence from trustworthy and authority sites sends positive signals to Google that your blog post deserves to be indexed.

4. Create well-optimized content

The goal of search engines is to provide a better user experience. Here are some of the content optimization tips to help with ranking:

  • Use the main keywords in the first 100 words.
  • Create good titles. This is the first thing readers will see even before they click through to your site.
  • Make your content easier to read. Avoid walls of texts, use bullets, and break the content into several sections.
  • Make sure you organize your blog post ideas. They should have a clear flow. And it will make it easier to create new posts.
  • Include high-quality images.
  • Learn how to capitalize your blog post titles to avoid inconsistencies in style.

Bottom Line

SEO is not magic. It takes time and effort to see results, but the wait is often worthwhile.

Sources & links

Check out the sources where we get our facts and find more interesting reading.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank/
https://www.zerolimitweb.com/organic-vs-ppc-2021-ctr-results-best-practices/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-index/#header5
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/08/optimize-your-crawling-indexing
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-indexing
https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

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