Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?

[DJ123]

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!

[William.Lau]

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.

[DJ123]

@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!

[EGOL]

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.

[DJ123]

Can I ask - what is your site's DA and PA average say for the homepage?

Thank you for your input, good job!

[EGOL]

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.

[DJ123]

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?

[EGOL]

No,  I rarely think about DA/PA.  I just make content and toss it up.  See what happens.