How long you've seen it take to rank in small niche

[BobGW]

Hello,

How long do you see small niche sites taking to rank where they should be for their strength?

Our last site took at least 6 months. Our current site's home page for our main term is stuck at around the 40th page and not moving. It's an exact match domain so it should be on at least page 2.

We have one site in the industry already that carries similar products but it is much bigger with a much wider scope of products. It took a while to rank too.

Our only backlinks I'm working on are Google & Youtube (and DMOZ), we have a facebook fan page. Our site is nicer than the site in position #1. Working on making as many pages as possible 10X content.

Thank You,

Bob

[GastonRiera]

Hi Bob,

You might know that it depends on the niche's difficulty.
In my experience, it ever took less than 6 weeks to rank in the 20s.

Also, I presume that you understand that having great content and a great site doesn't neccesarly mean you'll rank higher fast.
As you say the only backlinks you have are just a few, you might need a few more links to go higher. But, just links aren't the ticket to 1st page.
Usually on page optimization plays an important role in the rankings.
Are you sure that your more important pages are correctly optimized for the desired search terms? And just to role out the obvious, are you sure that google is seing your site? Are you getting the correct visibility from Google? What about other search engines?

I gave you more questions than answers, it may be that there's something that you've overlooked and missed. Or just that the niche is competitive enough so you wont rank better faster as you think.

Hope I've helped.
GR.

[Maayboli]

It depends on the niche, competition, Quality and frequency of content and also the language. I have been able to rank a site as less as 4 weeks. But Again I could not do scalably across languages and niches.

Unique Quality of content and frequency of publishing goes long way

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Bob,

Organic SEO isn't really my area, but if that niche is really niche, being stuck on page 40 after several months of work raises a red flag for me. Have you dug into Google Search Console to be sure there isn't a problem with a site?

[BobGW]

I found a checkbox in our cart today that rel-cononicals www, non-www, index.html, etc. They were separate. Do you guys think this could have caused it?

We also have a lot of these products on another site, this is a smaller, specific niche.

[EGOL]

I've had some keywords that I thought my site would shoot right to the top upon publishing a new page.  Why?  The competition was sleepy little sites that didn't use formal language, had lots of inaccurate and pseudo-information.  I thought that my site would roll right over them.  However, my site didn't make the top 50.  Six months later, still not in the top 50.  So, I take a close look and my bet was that the presence of informal, inaccurate, pseudocrap was probably what the masses of people were searching for.   I refused to put that stuff on my site - even in criticism - and now, after well over a year, some of my pages in this niche are starting to break into the top 10 and pull a little traffic.

So, you can have weak competitors, even BS competitors, but if they got the language of the niche and a tribe of searchers and visitors behind them, you might have trouble winning even if your metrics are overwhelming.

[BobGW]

Wow, I think that's exactly what is happening. There's a ton of spam being searched for. Really good insight EGOL, thanks a lot!

[EGOL]

This is just wildassguessing... When you metrics are overwhelming, and your content is greatly superior by formal industry standards... but these little cottage industry sites with informal content and a tribe of visitors are beating you.... your best prayer of getting to the top is to be patient and allow Google to observe that your visitor metrics put enough weight on the scale to make your site more credible.

Google will believe rubbish for a while but strong truth can still prevail.