You’re probably wondering why I’m writing about age this time, but it’s not your age, but the age of your website. I’m not talking about youthful age, but older age, and yes, it does have an effect on how your site performs in the search engines.
In some of the blog posts I’ve written for Savvy Marketers, I’ve talked about things that the search engines use in the way they rank sites, such as keywords, content, meta tags, links etc. Another of the things search engines look at is the age of a website, and unfortunately it does have an effect on rankings, particularly for competitive keywords.
When a brand new website is launched, it does take a while before results are seen, not so much for niche keywords, but for more competitive keywords. Google uses trust in the way that it ranks sites and since a brand new site has no history, and usually, few, if any sites linking to it, it doesn’t have much to go on in terms of trustworthy sites linking back to it. This also means that sites trying to artificially inflate their back links using link farms and other dodgy techniques won’t just get to the top overnight. It’s always quality over quantity.
So, what does this mean for your fledgling website? For starters, it does mean that you need to be patient and find other ways of attracting visitors to your website. However, as I mentioned earlier, generally it’s the most competitive keywords which are harder to come by, so why not seek out niche keywords that are easier to rank for, and could mean that you stand out from some of your competitors? Ranking for niche keywords which are less competitive not only means that results can be seen more quickly, but also that those people who find your site are going to be highly targeted visitors and hopefully, even more likely to enquire or buy from you.
It’s important not to get too obsessed with high traffic competitive keywords, when often it’s the more niche keywords that convert well, leading to sales and enquiries. When your site is more established with a number of quality links pointing to it, then you can try to target some of the more competitive mainstream keywords. But if your niche is serving you well, then you may find you don’t need to compete for these keywords anyway.
So in the case of SEO, having older age on your side does help, which is fine by me!
