Have you ever watched a baseball player pick up his bat and point it to the fences? Calling his shot?
You probably only really saw something like that in the movies…because it doesn’t really happen.
Besides the famous Babe Ruth moment where he called out his home run, professional baseball players aren’t arrogant enough to call their shot (even Barry Bonds).
The same concept applies to SEO and predicting how long it will take to rank for a keyword.
I do understand why someone would want to know how long it will take…if you’re paying good money for a service, you’d like to know when you’re going to see a return…this is by far the most popular question that we get asked by new prospects.
The problem is, like Baseball, SEO is not very precise.
You can make educated guesses based on current competition and market conditions, but predicting how long it will take to rank for a set of keywords is arrogant, if not downright stupid.
There are over 200 ranking factors involved with why a site ranks for a particular keyword and by the time you could crunch the data to try and “call your shot”, the landscape is likely to have changed.
Some of the main factors involved with the “how long will it take” question:
Where do you currently rank? If you’re starting out on page 10, it’s going to take longer to get to page 1 then if you’re starting out on page 2. That’s just common sense.
How fast do you want to go (aka what’s your budget)? How much time do you want to dedicate towards improving your rankings? The more time you can dedicate towards link building, the quicker you’re going to see results.
How many links do you have and how many links do your competitors have (and how strong are those links)? This is where the math starts to get fuzzy. You can easily count how many links you have and how many your competitors have but how strong are those links? In other words, how much weight does Google give those links in it’s algorithm? Good luck figuring that one out!
How large are your competitors sites? Do you only have 10-20 pages of unique content while your competitors have 1000 pages? Sites that have built up large amounts of unique content over time have more authority in Google and it can be pretty hard to catch up. This is something that takes time and resources to build up and you can’t duplicate overnight.
How old are your competitors sites? Old “crusty” domains as we call them tend to carry more weight in Google…how much more weight? No one knows, but all things being equal, an old domain will rank higher than a new one because of it’s seniority.
There are a lot more ranking factors to consider but these are some of the big ones. Unfortunately, there’s almost no form of marketing that is predictable and sometimes you just have to dive in to test how things are going to work out.
I like to tell people that 6 months is a good time frame to have in mind if you’re going at a moderate pace for a relatively competitive keyword. Sometimes it might take 8 months, sometimes 4, but 6 is a good estimate to see some kind of return on your investment.
