First Page Placement Means Traffic, End of Story

There’s a few people out there who are claiming that organic SEO isn’t the be-all and end-all of traffic building. They want you to remember that social marketing, pay-per-click, and a host of other methods can also be used to drive traffic.

And it’s true — those things can drive traffic. They work. Just not in a way that small businesses and other commercial clients need their traffic to work. There’s exactly one thing that, at the end of the day, works for businesses: first page placement on Google. First page placement on Google has a few attributes that separate it from the other methods of gaining traffic:

Targeting
When someone goes to Google and searches for something, and they see your website on the search results, you can be 99% positive that they wanted to see your business. With a few exceptions (try searching for a few variations of ‘date’ and see what gets you food and what gets you Adult Friend Finder), Google is really, really good at making sure that people who see your site are actually looking for it. The same can’t be said of social marketing, where people are more likely to visit because they like the poster rather than liking the content. Organic Google traffic is among the most well-targeted traffic you can get.

Consistency
Mathematics has this thing called the Law of Large Numbers, that basically says ‘the more times you do something that has varying results, the closer you get to the actual average of those results.’ If you flip a coin a million times, you’re pretty darn likely to get about 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails. Google traffic follows this law as well — if you have a keyword with 5,000 daily searches, you know that a first page placement is going to pretty regularly expose your website to 5,000 people. Pay-pet-click marketing doesn’t have that kind of consistency because you never know who else has put new campaigns together, what they’ve bid on the same keywords you’re bidding on, and so on. Being on Google’s first page means you can count on visitors coming every day.

In short: there are other methods of getting traffic out there, no doubt — but none of them work as well as the standard first page placement in Google’s search results, period.