Niche Industry
A niche industry is represented by phrases that are relatively specific, such as "widgets Bellingham". While they don't require a geographic modifier, phrases focused on a very specific area often are consideredniche. Phrases used for a niche site will also often return less than 100,000 results in a Google search. Thetop 10 ranking sites will also often have less than 100 inbound links each.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Possibly as little as a few months
- Established Site: Potentially it could literally be over night, but most likely around 6 weeks.
Medium Industry terms are slightly more general, but still include some kind of modifier, such as a state or color; "Washington Widgets" or "Blue Widgets". These phrases often represent no more than a few million results in a typical Google search with the top 10 ranking sites having between 100-1,000 inbound links.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: 6 months to a year
- Established Site: 2-4 months
These pages are those with phrases that are rather broad and seldom have any modifiers, such as simply"widgets". You will often find tens or even hundreds of millions of competing pages in Google for yourtarget phrase. Often the links required for the top 10 will be in the thousands, or tens of thousands(sometimes even in the millions).
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Anywhere from 1 to 5 years
- Established Site: Could be as long as a year or more
For more established sites, rankings tend to come much more quickly. One significant factor in
determining time is links. If your established site has lots, but the site itself is simply lacking fundamental SEO or proper navigation, then you can sometimes see results rather quickly. If you have no links and need to build them, it significantly increases the wait time. Even for an established site, achieving links in a competitive industry can still take some time.
Rankings Are Taking Forever
There are a number of reasons why your site may not achieve results. If you find that your campaign has been going on for a long time and you have seen no movement what-so-ever, it is possible that one of the following is hindering your efforts.
Spamming & Penalties
In some cases your site may take forever to achieve rankings, or the rankings may not come at all. If yoursite has been previously penalized for spamming, you absolutely must clean up all traces of the past dirtiness. Once the site is entirely cleaned up, then you can apply for re-inclusion. This is certainly no assurance that Google will ever pay your site any attention again, but it's the first step to the land of maybe.
Duplicate Content
If your site has utilized mass amounts of duplicate content, chances are you will not ever see rankings until you replace it all with something original and meaningful. There is no "duplicate content" penalty per-se, but you are essentially penalizing yourself if you copy content. Google tends to look at the first instance it finds online for a piece of content as the official source (not always the case). If you copy content that is already out there and indexed by Google, they will discount your content as it is already indexed somewhere else, and your site or page will simply not get any rankings for it - and rightfully so.
Links
If your site has no links, you probably will not get any rankings, even after you are fully indexed. This is not always the case, I have seen sites rank well for various phrases with zero inbound links - but it is rare, and should not be relied on. On the flip side of this, let's say your site has thousands of links, but they are from free for all sites, link farms, or "bad neighborhoods", and so on - they won't help you. These links won't necessarily hurt you, but will be essentially ignored. You need quality, relevant links.
Competition
You just may be out of your league. If you have a small operation, and are competing for a major ultra competitive term, chances are you won't ever see the light of day. Not to say it is not possible, but if you are competing in a well established industry where literally 10's of thousands of links are required, and your target phrase is experiencing millions of searches a month, you need to weigh your targets. Chances are your keywords need to be re-evaluated as your chances of success are slim.
