How Long Does it Take to Rank in Google's Top 3 Results?

We’ve all received the spam emails from an anonymous Gmail account promising to get our website to the top of Google’s search results page within 30 days.

It's a load of nonsense, with these people harvesting your email address and then sending the same message to millions of people.

They have no idea of what your site needs. All they are after is for you to take the bait.

However, it raises a question Boylen (www.boylen.com.au) gets asked a lot: how quickly can I expect results?

The answer is that you could expect to see results within a month. But if you are currently ranked in position 100 for a search term, you can’t expect to go to position one in 30 days.

The sensible business strategy is to approach it the way you deal with customer service or cleanliness or the quality of your food. You don’t treat those as a campaign that you can turn on and off.

SEO is the same. It’s a process, not a campaign. It needs to be “always on”.

If you keep working at it, the results will come.

OUR EXAMPLE

We’ve been running a campaign for the search terms “website design Adelaide” and “web design Adelaide” for our own company, Boylen +.

We had taken our eye off the ball and slipped back to page two.

So we hit the problem with significant resources, putting a minimum of two hours a day into a range of areas that needed improving.

WHAT WAS ACHIEVED?

Website Design Adelaide

21 June - 12th

29 June - 10th

11 July - 5th

Web Design Adelaide

21 June - 12th

29 June - 13th

11 July - 8th

You can see that it took us about three weeks to get to page one.

Potentially we might slip back for a bit but we expect to steadily improve because we can see the areas of greatest opportunity.

Based on some sound research, a site with a good domain rating and that can achieve 25 other websites pointing to it will take about 100 days to get into the top 3 results.

We’ve invested over $8,000 of staff time to get fast results. (But as the owner, I am doing a lot of the work after hours because I enjoy it and that way it doesn’t detract from our day-to-day operations.)

WHAT STEPS DID WE TAKE?

The first step we took was to work out what search terms (keywords) generate the most searches in our sector.

Those I’ve listed - “website design Adelaide” and “web design Adelaide” – are just two of many we are tracking. We know they generate a significant amount of traffic and that’s what we want.

The same applies to hotels. Find out what the keywords are that will give you the best return. But make sure they are achievable. For example, if we tried to rank for the word “SEO”, the competition would be 100 times greater than the two terms listed previously.

Next, we ran a series of audits on our website. In total honesty, it:

1. Was too slow to load.

2. Provided a poor mobile experience – as we had added to the design on desktop, where we get most traffic, the mobile version had suffered. That’s now been fixed but we’re still working on it on a weekly basis.

3. Lacked good content.

4. Wasn’t properly optimised for the keywords we were chasing.

5. Had issues with backlinks.

Because we’re AHA|SA silver partners, we’ll be completely upfront and let you know that our actual list is much, much longer than that. We keep some of our intellectual property under wraps because our competitors are always researching what other website design agencies and SEO Adelaide firms are doing.

We’ve worked on all aspects of our website. Google has at least 200 factors it considers when determining where you rank. The trick is to apply the 80/20 rule to start. The closer you get to the top of page one, the more you need to focus on the 80% that gets you the final 20% of traction.

We’ve got a plan that will carry us through the next six months. In time we will scale back to a few hours a week, although that may change if we find that intense competition is eroding our popularity with Google for our target keywords.

WHAT CAN HOTEL STAFF DO?

Perhaps you have marketing staff or someone in your office who manages your website as part of other responsibilities. Or maybe you own a small hotel and you’ll be doing the work yourself.

Look to see if you have Google Analytics in place. I’d be amazed if you don’t. This will give you data about your traffic and how people are finding you.

Next, use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to find out what actually drives the most traffic to pubs – and then see where you rank for those terms.

A note of caution: you can’t put search terms into your computer and expect an accurate result. Google adapts your results based on your previous searches. You need to use one of Google’s tools or one of the free online tools to get a true, unbiased picture.

Setting up a Google Ads account is a good idea because it offers a treasure trove of insights.

STAFF NORMALLY CAN’T DO IT ALL

Usually, we find staff across all industry sectors are only able to succeed up to a certain level.

There is so much to know and the tech is changing so quickly that only full-time SEO people have all the answers.

The good news is that you might find that getting started, reading “how to” articles and doing your best will give you great results. This would be especially true if you are in a country town where there is low competition.

FINAL TIP

As I’ve written in the past, focus on your location (ie. suburb or town).

Google Local Search drives a lot of traffic, especially if you show up as one of the three companies on the Google Map result at the top of the search results page.

I would suggest you type in “pubs in (name of suburb or town”). When you use the word hotel, you often come up against the big companies like Expedia that dominate the word “hotel”.

For this exercise, I typed in “pubs in Burnside”. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, I looked at the section where Google lists alternative searches people type in.

One of them is “pubs near me”. That is Google’s commitment to Local Search. It’s also how people think and type.

Also, to be found locally, you need a Google Business Profile … but that’s a story for another day.

OUCH, THAT HURT!

As I was writing this, an example of not expecting too much of your staff – which is mentioned in the main article – came to life in a rather dramatic fashion.

The Boylen Help Desk advised me that a client’s website had crashed after one of the client’s staff installed a plug in. Clearly they had enough knowledge to do this themselves – but not enough knowledge to be able to anticipate this problem. We fixed the problem and found an alternative solution.

I can pull a beer but I don’t know how to clean the lines. The same applies to SEO. There’s a lot that an interested person can do – but there’s a lot they can’t without training or years of experience.