First Page Placement on Google Searches — They’re Where Traffic Comes From

Organic search traffic comes from a very few places. You’re probably thinking “search engines, duh?” — but that’s the broad answer. Organic search traffic, realistically, can only be found in exactly 10 places in the world — the first 10 results on Google.com. You can get 1st place on Bing, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, Blekko, and all of the other search engines combined, and you won’t get as much traffic as you’ll get from a last-place first page placement on Google.

Why does this matter? It’s the entire purpose of website SEO. Let’s look at it a different way: from a return-on-investment perspective.

You’re a business owner, and you’ve sunk $600/month into organic SEO for the past year. You’re top-ranked for 6 keywords….on the second page of Google. For all that time and money, you get what? 6 clicks per keyword per day? You’ve got an important choice in front of you: quit wasting your money, or double down.

If you quit, you’ll have an RoI of about zero, because those six clicks per day aren’t worth jack. SEO will become a term you associate with getting raked over hot coals, and your website will languish in obscurity.

If you double down, however, you’ll probably bump up a spot — and with that one clickover, you’ll increase your traffic by a factor of ten. 60 clicks per keyword per day. More importantly, if you stay doubled down, you’ll continue to rise in the rankings. The first few nips upward, from 10th to 9th to 8th to 7th, are minor. That’s because the REAL traffic comes from the top few slots on the search results. Stick with it, however, and you’ll make it into the top 5 — and those six clicks per day will turn into six hundred.

The lesson here? There’s a lot of talk about traffic sources in all manner of internet marketing repository on the Internet — but it’s all a distraction. If you’re not getting your organic traffic from those top few spots at Google.com, you’re not getting traffic, end of story.