Google Search: Getting on Page One
posted by Bob Mills
Getting your business on Page 1 of the Google search results is a really big deal. In fact, for most small and medium size businesses, it’s one of the biggest things you can do to generate leads or visits to your store.
How important is a Page 1 ranking? According to SEO industry leader Moz, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks. Some studies have shown this to be as high as 92%. Second-page results, by comparison, account for a measly 6% or less of all website clicks.
Making it on to Page 1 is an impressive achievement, but getting to the top of the page is important too. That’s because the first five results on Page 1 receive 67.6% of clicks, whereas the remaining five receive just 3.73%.
Most of these clicks to business websites come from organic search rather than paid advertising. According to a study by the content marketing firm Bright Edge, organic search accounts for 51 percent of all visitors to business websites. For B2B companies, the numbers are even higher, with 73 percent of website visits resulting from unpaid searches on Google and other search engines. By comparison, paid search – like Google pay-per-click advertising – is responsible for just 10 percent of business website visits, while social media accounts for a mere 5 percent.
So getting your company to rank high in the search engine results is important. But how do you do that?
Reaching For the Top
There are a lot of things that go into determining how your organization’s website will fare in any online search. Some of those things have to do with the amount of traffic your website is currently drawing, but other factors may include the relevance of your website content to the keywords being searched, how well your website copy is written, the care with which you’ve applied keywords to your web pages, and how well your website works for people doing mobile search. Plus a couple dozen other things as well.
Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) can quite literally put your company on the map. You’ve probably noticed that every Google search for businesses in your local area generates a map near the top of the search results page. Here’s the map for the search I did while writing this blog post, using the keywords “Advertising Agencies Hamilton Ontario” .
Getting on the map is one of our key goals when optimizing websites for search. When we’re “on the map”, it tells us we’ve done a good job in making our website visible to everyone in our local market area.
Getting on Page 1 Baby!
Getting on Page 1 is easy if your company is large, but if you’re a smaller business you’ll have to fight to make it there. Search engine optimization can help you get there.
SEO is an important part of your digital strategy and a critical component of every website project. To learn more about SEO and how it might benefit your organization, give us a call or send us a brief note here.