Getting your content to rank on the first page is the best way to drive organic traffic to your site. Websites that invest in SEO from the start, get over 4,000+ visits in the first year. And the websites that don't, get 0, and lose on the potential to gain more and more presence over time.
How do we know this? We have anaylized over 28,000 new websites and what they have achieved in a year.
This article covers all of our top findings, and provides guidance on how you can use this data to craft your own successful SEO strategy.
- Out of the 28,000 domains we studied, only 7.65% had content ranking in the top 100 for the entire length of the study (13 months).
- Nearly all (92.3%) of the domains ranking in the top 100 for all 13 months had at least one backlink
- By the 6th month, only 19% of the domains started ranking in top 10 and maintained there till the end of the period
- 55.1% of the domains that failed to make it to the top 10 had no backlinks
- The average length of keywords for the top 10% of sites ranges from 3.2 to 3.5 words.
- Longer content performed better—content ranking in the top positions was on average 3.5 times longer than other lower-ranking pieces
- Domains in the top positions maintained better site health overall, compared to lower-ranking sites
From July 2021 to July 2022 (13 months total), we collected the historical data of the number of keywords each website ranked for.
We eliminated any domains that fell out of the top 100 altogether at any point during the course of the study, to eliminate spam websites or abandoned domains. This left us with 2,155 websites remaining, meaning more than 92% of websites failed to stay within the top 100 over one year.
We kept watch over these remaining domains, monitoring which ones appeared in the top 10 results for at least one keyword at least once over the period.
Finally, we refined our remaining domains to a set of 178 “winners” using two criteria:
- Winning domains had at least 8 positions in the top 10 search results by July 2022
- The total search volume for their ranking keywords was at least 1,160
We compared those to the full group of qualifying domains to find any common characteristics that explain why they performed so well comparatively.
We’ll begin by examining some of the patterns we saw regarding the 2,155 qualifying websites.
Getting the first page at least once in a year was achievable for most qualified websites, but in many cases their hold on those positions would fluctuate. Our findings show that it’s common for domains to lose their top-10 positions and gain others month to month.
The overall percentage of sites ranking in the top 10 increased, leveling off at around 41% toward the end of the study.
27% of the websites that made it to the top 10 remained there for the entire length of the study.
Backlinks play a major role in ranking success. Of the qualified websites, more than half of those without at least one backlink never reached the first page.
More Referring Domains
In this chart, you can see that the top-performers steadily increased the median number of referring domains linking to their site, while the group average among all qualifying sites remained stagnant for most of the year.
The top 10% of domains ended the year with an average domain authority of 20.3, while the average for the qualified group was under 10.
Top-performing websites ranked for keywords with significantly higher search volume, compared to the larger group of qualified websites.
The top 10% steadily earned more and more search volume from their top-10 keywords, likely because their increased domain authority allowed them to rank for more competitive, higher-volume phrases.
For these top performers, organic traffic increased steadily until leveling off and decreasing slightly toward the end of the study period. Still, they received a much higher volume of organic traffic than the group of qualifying sites, even after the plateau.
The average word count for the top performers was 846 words, compared to an average of 243 words for all qualifying websites. This suggests longer content increases the likelihood of ranking on the first page:
When we isolated the top-performing 10% of domains, we saw that by the end of the year, they got more pages ranking in the top 10 positions.
Using Semrush’s sophisticated site auditing tool, we analyzed the overall site health of all qualifying pages, once again comparing the top 10% to the full group.
While both groups maintained a site health average score of 84 out of 100, the top-performing websites featured nearly double the median number of pages crawled.
There are a number of things growing websites can do to get onto the first page faster and start pulling in organic traffic within a year.