First Page Placement: It Means EVERYTHING

If you have a web based business and you don’t have a first page placement on Google for at least a few high-traffic keywords relevant to your product or service, you are losing the game. End of story. In fact, if you’re not in the top 3 listings for your keywords of choice, you’re losing.

Here’s why.

When you look at the behavior of people on Google, a very reliable set of statistics shows up over and over again: people don’t click any further down the list than they have to. The first big split is between people who click on the Sponsored Links (25% of all searchers) and people who skip them and go to the organic results (the other 75%.)

So if you have a search term that gets 1000 hits/day, you’re losing 250 of them to pay-per-click marketers right off the bat. Of the remaining 750 hits, 50% of them click on the first link. Another 15% click on the second link, and another 10% click on the third link. That’s 75% of the remaining 750 that vanish into the top 3.

That leaves only 187 people left to continue on down the page. A few percent veer off at each stop along the way until you get to the last link on the page, which steals about 1.5% of the traffic, leaving only 2.5% of surfers who ever click onto the second page. That’s 25 of your 1000 searches per day that reach Page 2, and then the cycle starts all over again. Half of that 2.5% click on the top link on page 2, and so on.

Let me put that in a different perspective: it’s better to be 3rd place for a keyword that only gets 400 searches per day than it is to be on the top of page 2 for a keyword that gets a massive 3,200 searches per day.

Of course, it’s a hell of a lot more affordable SEO-wise to get a ranking on a less competitive search term, as well. So not only do you end up paying less, but you end up getting more traffic out of the deal as well. That’s why, even if it means targeting “less valuable” keywords, it should be first page placement or bust.