Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
-
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago.
For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is.
Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain?
Thank you for your insights!
-
No, I rarely think about DA/PA. I just make content and toss it up. See what happens.
-
Excellent, good show.
The keywords we are trying to rank for, MOZ says it has a 28% difficulty, so I do not think we will need a 79/82 horsepower to rank on page 1 in a good position. I suspect that since DA is calculated on a log scale, the difficulty % is also probably logarithmic, so a 48% difficulty would take quite a lot more DA to rank, than just a linear interpolation would suggest for a 28% difficulty.
I wonder if you can approximate how much DA/PA it takes to rank at a given difficulty % - have you ever given thought to this?
-
The site above has a DA of 79 and the homepage has a PA of 82.
But, things work the same on another site that I run. It has a DA of 27 and a homepage PA of 37. It competes in an easier sleepier niche but articles on that site start deep and climb slowly over time.
-
Can I ask - what is your site's DA and PA average say for the homepage?
Thank you for your input, good job!
-
I really like this question. My answer is YES!
When I publish a new article and link it into my site it generally starts off very very deep in the SERPs. Too deep to pull big traffic for its primary keywords.... but because my articles are usually quite long (500 to 2000 words) with diverse terminology they do pull in some traffic for long tail keywords.
So, they start deep in the SERPs and then, over time, they V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y climb the SERPs.
As an example, a little over a year ago, I published a new article targeting a keyword with a Moz difficulty of about 48%. That article started deep in the SERPs at about position #150. It hung there for a few weeks and then month by month it moved up a few places. About nine months later it was on the first page, and now about a year and a half later it ranks at #2 or #3.
For about three months it received fewer than ten visitors per day from the SERPs. At the same time it received only about twenty visitors per day from my internal traffic. Six months later it was receiving about 40 visitors per day from the SERPs and now it is receiving about 80 per day.
I did zero linkbuilding for this article. Just tossed it up and went to work on other things. So far it has attracted about six very good links and a lot of spam links. Not much. It has about 152 facebook likes, a dozen tweets but a lot of action for the photos on Pinterest.
In my opinion, the article is a good one, it has a number of nice professionally done photos and a few good external references, so people who click into it stay. I think that google through Chrome and SERP clickthroughs and backbuttons can determine if people respond well to the article and use that data to influence its rankings.
Most of the aritles that I write behave this way. A lot of them make the first page of google for keywords of similar difficulty, but before I write them I make sure that I am going to produce an article that deserves first page - or I don't write it. A few have been disappointments. I have one written at about the same time as the one above that seems to be stuck about three or four pages down in the SERPs, but it is about a subject that has a lot of contamination in the SERPs - such as Java (programming language, coffee, island, and assorted stuff).
So, yes, if you are seeing your content climb then you might be doing something right that you can scale over time.
-
@William - thank you for the response.
Very interesting indeed, it seems that they ramp in slowly, like a soft-start (if anyone is familiar with what I am talking about).
In any case, thank you for your time and response!
-
Yes, you will gradually start ranking better assuming you continue to optimize. Unless you are one of the authority sites in your space, it will take time to rank.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
Duplicate content. Competing for rank.
Scenario: An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy. Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google? Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
What is the best way to track rank?
I'm curious what tools and tracking mechanisms everyone uses to track rank, especially with all of the changes in the last year. I've read a ton of articles that say even in 2014, rank will continue to matter, but besides using the keyword rank tool in Moz, I was hoping to learn what everyone else uses to track rank on a keyword and page level (are those two separate things?).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RachelEm0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I'm curious about the relationship (or lack of ) between Google rankings and Bing rankings. We took a huge hit last winter with Google and have since gotten back up to the top 3 and have been holding steady on all our most important terms. Most of our losses since regaining Google, have been with Bing. This week, we dropped 44 points on Bing and Yahoo! for our most important term. Are there known factors for Bing ranking? If so, can anyone please enlighten me? And does anyone think Bing rankings even matter these days?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel1 -
Dropping dramatically in keyword rankings
One of my clients has always ranked well for this keyword (janitorial services, nh). Then within a week, they dropped out of the top fifty in Google and now in other major search engines as well. My first thought of why the drop in rankings is due to duplicate listings within online directories. The previous marketing person on staff was listing the company more than once in these directories, and it wasn't discovered until later in the link building process. Sometimes the company was listed with "janitorial services" as part of the company name, and then listed again with "carpet cleaning" as part of the company name... sometimes with duplicate address, or using the po box instead - as if two companies. The odd thing in all this is that while they dropped in ranking for this keyword, they still come in usually 1st in Google Places for this keyword with 12 excellent reviews. And yet when I check their Google Places account, it says that it needs to be reverified, again, it doesn't meet the terms. (company is a family owned business, for over 30 years, they have a lot of potential). So all this duplication needs to be fixed, but how serious are duplicate listings on places like Manta, YellowPages, SuperPages, also Yahoo Business Local and Bing Business Directory? And now that "forensics" seems to be my task, any suggestions on how to start? Any processes I should go through with Google WebMaster? _Cindy And, too, if I could add, the site ranks very poorly for this keyword and while I have provided recommendations, and they understand the onsite issue, they have yet to go forward with implementation, making this a little more difficult issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0 -
Time To Throw In The Towel?
I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well. Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms. Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice? Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010