First Page Placement Is Not a Goal

Every client who comes in to our offices (or gets an email consultation for the more distant ones) gets asked: “what is your goal?” Not surprisingly, a goodly number of them respond with some variation of “I want first page placement for my landing pages.” That’s when we ask ourselves whether we’re going to nod and smile and move forward, or whether we’re going to tell them the truth: first page placement is not a goal.

Let us explain. It’s all well and good to want your landing pages to be on the first page of the SERPs for the keywords we decide to target. Heck, that’s what we want for your landing pages, too! But there are two significant problems with setting that as your goal.

First Page Placement is a Process, Not a Goal

If you reach the first page of Google for all of your chosen keywords, it’s time to celebrate! But celebrating doesn’t mean you’ve reached your goal. When you reach a goal, you get to stop. That’s what makes it a goal: it’s a finishing line. Being on the first page of Google isn’t a finishing line, because it’s a constant struggle to stay there, and an even greater struggle to increase your position on the first page.

Your competitors are constantly working to attain the same status that you enjoy, and because they’re not succeeding, they’re constantly estimating whether or not they can spend more than you are. Some of them will decide that they can, and they’ll do put a lot of effort into unseating you. But that’s not the real problem with this whole concept, anyway.

First Page Placement Is a Step On a Larger Process, Not an End Point

Getting your landing page on the first page — or even in the very first spot of the first page — of Google isn’t going to accomplish anything relevant to your business by itself. The only thing it’s going to get you is ‘people looking at your landing page.

If that’s all they do, you’ve wasted your money. You need to couple first page placement with an effective website that ensnares, enraptures, and then converts visitors. If ‘converts’ means ‘makes them buy from you,’ your goal needs to be stated in terms of either RoI or numbers of sales. If ‘converts’ means ‘makes them sign up for a thing,’ your goal needs to stated in terms of numbers of conversions.

In short, when you come to an SEO company, whether it’s SEO911 or someone else, come in with a goal in mind that is directly measured in whatever terms your business or organization as a whole measures success in. First page placement is good, and it’s why we exist, but it’s not the point of why we exist.