It's good to be at the top, right?
There have been a number of stories and studies done showing how you want to be the top result in Google:
Top Google Ranking Captures 18.2% of Clicks [Study] (searchenginewatch.com)
Top Google Result Gets 36.4% of Clicks [Study] (searchenginewatch.com)
Playing Monopoly - The Top Spot in Google (webstix.com)
Basically, the top result on Google gets the most clicks - more than result #2 and so on. That's where you want to be... but for which terms?
Well, you can do some keyword analysis and find out what people are searching for but keep in mind that 20% (or more) of searches being done have never been done before:
Interesting Google mobile search stats (mad4mobilephones.com)
According to Adrian 20 percent of search terms on the mobile (and normal) internet are unique terms that have never been searched for before.
Google: 25% Of Queries Are New & Adding Question Engine (searchengineland.com)
Manber said 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees today have never seen before. Wow, 25% of the queries people enter into Google today, were not seen before today?
How can you optimize for 20% or more of searches that have not even been searched on before? Well, you can't but you can still rank high for them. The key is content. The more content you have on your site, the more likely you are to rank for these new searches.
Being the top result on a Google search is huge. You get a lot more clicks being ranked #1 than #2, #3, #4 or #5 combined. Here are results from a variety of studies which show how many more clicks you get when you rank #1.
Overall, users clicked on one of the top three results 68 percent of the time:
On branded searches, the top search result overwhelmingly received the most clicks (which makes sense, considering the search is likely navigational in nature):
On non-branded searches, however, the data indicates that searchers are more willing to go beyond the top 3 results:
To find out more about this study, click on the link above.
When it comes to clicks on those organic listings, 53 percent go to the top result. The second sees 15 percent of the action, the third 9 percent, the fourth 6 percent, dwindling all the way down to 4 percent to round out the top 5.
To find out more about this study, click on the link above.
Websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent; and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. Being number one in Google, according to Optify, is the equivalent of all the traffic going to the sites appearing in the second through fifth positions.
To find out more about this study, click on the link above.
The click-through rate for a website in the top spot is 18.2 percent, with second position at 10.05 percent and third at 7.22 percent. It's still clear that the number one position is the ideal place to be (number one got more clicks than two and three combined, and over a third of all clicks on the home page). While the gap between first, second, and third is smaller than in previous studies, this holds with the common logic of research that's been done in the past.
They also refer to the Optify study, which had these results:
To find out more about this study, click on the link above.
Chitika decided to find out what it was worth to them by looking at a sample of traffic coming into its network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The top organic position drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost the combined total of positions 2 through 5 slots, and more than the combined total of traffic to longtail positions, 5 through 20 (the end of page 2).
To find out more about this study, click on the link above.
Getting the top result on Google can be tricky or it can be rather simple. It'll greatly depend on what industry you're in and what the competition is like for the keywords you want to go after. The first step is always keyword research so that you optimize for keywords that people are typing in to search engines. If you don't do that, you're going to waste your time.
We have a lot of good articles here on our website about SEO (search engine optimization) which will help you get the top spot on Google. I've listed a few below. If you want help doing this, please contact Webstix to find out more.
Ok, so the numbers aren't totally accurate across studies but that's fine. The takeaway here is that the first position/result is much better than the second and so on. Don't settle for being ranked #4 or even #2. If you really want to see traffic to your website, strive to rank #1 for sure.
Along with this, I've read another study explaining how the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to click on organic results versus paid listings.
When writing content for these new searches, you have to think like a searcher. From what I've seen, most of these searches are questions. People are asking Google questions quite a bit. It seems that right now, Google isn't set up to translate a question into finding the result that matches that question. I bet they will eventually - they have to working on this already. Until they do (and probably even after they figure that out), you have an opportunity to be the top result.
What I mean is, have content that asks questions and then write the answer:
Does this look like something familiar? It's basically an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, right?
People are searching for things online - I'm sure you've heard that before. We all have. Others are browsing - like people on Facebook, Twitter and other social media - they're bored, basically. Which people do you want to come to your website? The people that are searching for something, of course. They're in a problem solving mode. Maybe they need an answer or maybe they're going to buy something they need to solve a problem. This is the place to be.
The more content you have on your website, the bigger the net you have. The bigger the net, the more fish (customers) you get.
The secret here is that not everyone knows this. People are kind of lazy (in general). Creating content for a website is seen as boring work for most people - that's why, right now, it's still fairly easy to rank high for search terms. There's still a window - right now- where you can do more than your competition and rank above them. Google likes websites with rich, original content. That's the secret to SEO - oops, did I just give that away for free?
I written a lot about this here on our blog. What I'm adding now is that your FAQs page needs to be not just a page but a small library. You might wonder how big it needs to be. Should it be 10 pages? 50 pages? 100 pages? Well, think big. And don't think that it'll ever be done. Add 3 questions and answers a week. That's 12 a month or 144 pages a year. Do that and you'll have several hundred pages working for you, 24 hours a day in a few years.
So how do you get customers by answering all their questions for free on your website? That's an important question. You want to appear as an expert but still hold some things back in most cases. You also need to sprinkle your articles with calls to action. Let people know that there's more and that they need to contact you or buy your service. Here's an example and the conclusion of this post:
Find out more about a plan to write content for your website. We can discuss this with you so that you can outrank your competition and have your website actually working for you as a tool. Get residual return on your investment with your website.
-Tony 🙂
