It’s pretty easily understood that the main goal of Search Engine Optimization is to get to one of the top spots on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But that sometimes leads clients to ask… how “top” is top enough to start making a difference in the traffic they see coming to their site?
The answer to that question depends quite a bit on what sort of key words or phrases you’re emphasizing. After all, searchers will go a lot deeper to find new theories on medical treatments than they will the best prices on cell phone cases. Still, there are some general guidelines you can rely upon:
Improvement is usually exponential. Moving from the seventh page of results on a heavily-searched keyword to the fifth will usually bring in a trickle of new hits, but moving from the fifth to the third could easily quadruple the number of visitors to your site. Since most searchers won’t look past the first two or three pages, SEO improvement tends to be exponential – the biggest gains are at the top.
Once you make it to the first page, things get tricky… Studies often show that while the third result on a page might do better than the fifth, for example, the tenth can outperform the seventh. Confused yet? The point is that the way humans scan a page means that getting onto the first page is important, but your results might vary a bit once you are there.
There is no one position that matters. Even though you might be doing well on one of your main keywords or phrases, success in search engine optimization is usually dependent on improvement in several terms, raising your site’s overall number of hits steadily. It might be easier to increase your position and one or two areas , but the real, bottom line gains will be small if searchers change their habits, or if those terms don’t end up being as profitable as you had thought.
