It’s very rare that a company will be unaware of the SEO ranking they have, although the depth of their knowledge will vary. If you are a novice when it comes to online marketing, then you will probably just know that you don’t appear very high for your few target key-phrases, or maybe model codes too. If you are looking at SEO or have a campaign in place, then potentially you will track all your target key phrases.
The rankings in search engines for key terms are referred to in SEO as ‘SERPs’, which stands for ‘Search Engine Results Pages’. This covers all the different engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo and means the list of organic results that are provided by weighting. This weighting system is determined from a number of factors, each engine having differing factors in place for how to rank a site.
Organic SEO Rankings are very much after, how much is determined by the value of the market sector and the competition. The way in which Google ranks a website is a mix of relevant content, incoming link popularity, incoming vs outgoing links, density of keywords and code to text and much much more. It’s a very complex subject and just another reason why SEO Ranking is not just difficult but also costly. Now there are so many well optimised pages on the Internet, entry to the top SEO Ranking spots is pretty tough. There will need to be a structured effort for any kind of product of service sector if you want to get to the top, even now for more local and niche markets.
So which positions are the ones that pull in the traffic? Well that will be dependent on the size of the monitor, the search engine being used and whether there are any local listings provided (and PPC (pay per click) listings too). All these elements are the factors which will bring lower SEO Rankings into play, but for many tough target keywords, only the top 1 or 2 results will be in eyes view on the SERP.
This means you should be aiming for number one, any other position in the SEO Ranking page and you risk getting a much lower unique visitor count. The other variable is the recent news that Google are starting to add some social networking results to the SERPs, pushing the organic lists further down. This is one factor we are all exposed too as the way rankings work are continually changed.
Tags: Link Popularity, SEO Ranking, SERPS
