There is a saying in the offline world of real estate that there are three things that are critical when considering buying property and they are position, position, position!!
In the on
line digital universe there are also three things that are vital to your web presence or online store and that is ranking, ranking, ranking!!
In fact the online world is in essence no different to real estate in that the position of your website on a search ranking page (SERP) can be the difference in 2010 between your business being a success or a failure.
Getting found online when people type in a phrase or keyword is now so important that companies can rise or fall due to their results in a Google search when customers are looking online for your products and services that you sell.
Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is the art and science of moving a website or blog up in search ranking results and needs to be factored into the building and ongoing optimizing of websites and blogs for your business.
How important is it to be on the first page or ideally ranking number one on the first page?
How important is ranking to get people to click through to your site when there are thousands of other companies competing to be on page one?
It is now known to be absolutely critical as research shows that 93% of all buying decisions start with an online search.
To put this into some perspective here are some statistics regarding click through traffic based upon the position that a page receives when entered into a search engine (this is from a study leaked from AOL’s search engine logs):
- The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
- The second position receives 11.94%
- Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
- The fourth placed position on page one receives 6.05%
- The others on the first page are under 5% of click through traffic
- The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic
- The next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%
- Third page receives a total of 2.42 %
- The fifth page receives a total of only 1.07%
- All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.
These figures were obtained are from an article titled “Beginners Guide to to SEO” that is certainly worth a read and which you can download from one of the top blogs on search engine optimisation, “SEO moz.com“.
Investing in “Search Engine Optimisation” consultancy services can greatly improve your chances of appearing on the first page of Google and should be considered as a high priority when building and maintaining your website or blog.
What I also found from this source was that being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company/website.
To summarize you give your website a nearly 43% chance of being clicked on if you rank number one on Google. If you are on the second page you only giving your website a 4% chance of being found via a Google search.
So do you think that investing in SEO might be worthwhile seeing that 93% of all buying decisions start with an online search?
Do you optimize your website or blog for search?
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I would have loved to done this post.
Thanks for such great post!!!!
You have increased my area of knowledge for offpage optimization.