Is it harder to get to the first page from the third page than from nowhere to some..

Is it harder to get to the first page of google from the third page for a competitive keyword than getting to the third page from nowhere?

My travel related website is around 9 months old. For the last 9 months I have been trying to optimize it and I managed to achieve good rankings for low and medium competitive keywords which unfortunately do not bring as much as traffic I wished For google.com, google.co.uk and google australia etc. I am on the third-fourth page for my high competitive keyword. I was not even there 2 months ago and my first ranking was the page 11-12.

So my question is; if I follow the same way for my SEO works, do you think will I be able to get to the page 1 soon or is it harder?

 

It honestly depends on the competition on the first page of Google. However, usually it is harder to go from the third page to the first than it is to go from nowhere to somewhere

 

As you says that you have the travel domain then i would like to say that travel related keywords have good competitions because there are lots of companies who are working on it. So its not so easy to get top rank on Google. As "eagle22" says that its all depend on competition.
You need to keep your SEO continue for your website. Do it in a natural manner.

 

No If your keywords have very tough competitions than it will take more time. But have to generate some more high quality back links. If you will do that than you will definitely get the P1 ranking for your website.