How Long Will It Take for My Website to Appear on Search Results
Your website is up. You've implemented actions and necessary steps to optimise it for search engines. But, why isn't it showing up on Google and other search engines? Or more specifically, when will the website appear on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)?
This article will give you insight as to how long it takes for a website to appear on SERPs and help you get a deeper understanding of SEO by looking at how search engines work and its implications in relation to some factors affecting it.
When will my website show on searches?
It can take anywhere from 3 months to 6 months for a website to be crawled by Google and other search engines and attribute authority to the domain.
Apart from making sure that your website and all its contents are relevant to your target audience, there are a lot of other variables that affect how search engines rank your website. This is why you need an SEO tool - to make sure you know what to optimise so you not just appear in the results, but you rank high, as well.
Among the many factors that play an essential role in deciding the actual time frame of results after you start doing SEO are as follows: high-quality content, security, mobile-friendliness, user experience, page speed, keywords, geographic location, internal links, external links and domain age.
For Self-Managed SEO
If you're using the Crazy Domains Simple SEO tool, an added factor would be your actual implementation of the suggested SEO actions. There is no guarantee that you will appear in search results as this entirely depends on you and how you manage your website with the tools that you have.
For Managed SEO
If you've hired a professional through our Managed SEO services, you are guaranteed to appear on search results and see improvements in your ranking. However, how long these results take will also depend on the number of SEO implementation and management hours included in your chosen plan. The higher the implementation hours, the faster your website is optimised for search engine results and rankings.
Regardless of the tools and services you're using, websites will start seeing results as early as three months on average - or, the time it takes for search engines to crawl and index your website.
It's good to note that SEO results grow over a period of time. This means that the kind of results you get at 12-16 months is much better than what you would experience at 12 months.
Let's understand this better by digging a bit deeper into how search engines work, and why it takes time to see results - especially the results that we want.
How do search engines work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
SEO is all about making sure that search engines notice and trust you enough to list you at the top of its recommendations list. Search engines, like Google, work by crawling, indexing, and ranking. Let's take a look at each, focusing on Google as our example.
| Crawl | Index | Rank |
Crawling
This is the process that search engines use to discover new content or new updates made to websites and web pages across the Internet. Google uses Googlebots or "spiders" to scour and crawl through the billions of pages on the web to do this.
Indexing
During this stage, spiders gather the millions of data crawled and store it in Google's massive servers. All the data is organised according to keyword relevance, domain authority, among others. Once the page is indexed, it means that it's now searchable.
Ranking
When a searcher enters keyword/s on Google, the search engine runs back to its indexed data, sifts through all of the relevant information, and serves the results back to the searcher - arranged according to relevance. Every search engine has a unique formula for how they rank the information. And although the formula is unknown, the factors that affect ranking can be observed over time.
Here's a simple exercise:
Imagine asking a trusted friend, who travels a lot, for the best places to visit. (This is your search engine query.)
- Your friend will only be able to recommend places he's visited or learned about.
(This is the information he has previously crawled.) Those he hasn't heard of, no matter how amazing, won't be on his list. - He may know a lot of places, but will trim down his recommendations based on your keyword: "best".
So he goes through his thoughts (his indexed data) and pulls up all info that matches "best places" + "places to visit". - Satisfied by his thought process (criteria used to rank his recommendations), he finally gives you a list of places and tells you what his top ones are.
After a while, you meet your friend again and catch up on the same topic. But this time, his list is different because he's "crawled" for more updated information by doing some research since your last talk. (Crawled, indexed, and ranked based on a more updated criteria.)
Likewise, this is how search engines work. Their criteria is never the same. As searchers evolve, they too evolve.
What are the implications?
First, your website has to be crawled and indexed in their servers, before you can even appear on SERPs. And these processes take time. A local business with 50 pages running on its website is entirely different from an international business with thousands of pages running online.
Next, there are several other factors that determine how fast your SEO efforts will start delivering results. For someone with a completely new website, with fresh content, and a new domain name without a defined business history, it could take a while to start showing at the top of the results list. Why? Because you're still trying to build trust, and both Domain Age and Domain Authority (built through backlinks) are factors, too. In which case, you may need specialised managed SEO services to help optimise your website.
Bottom Line
As a website owner, you need to think of SEO as an investment. The longer you invest your money, efforts, and time - the more you will get over time.
Learn how you can get started with our self-managed SEO tool, or compare what you get with just the SEO tool vs our Managed SEO services through these linked guides.