This site normally ranks at Number One on English-speaking versions of Google for ‘writing for seo’. I’m also working on getting similar placements for a whole list of other key phrases I’ve researched.
Why am I and most site owners so keen on those high placements?
Top Search Engine Positions – the numbers
We all know that the majority of clicks (traffic) comes from natural search results shown on the first page of Google. There have been plenty of studies of clicking behaviour, but I’m going going to quote from research by Compete.com that came out towards the end of last year and was widely reported.
- 53% of clicks come from Position 1
- 15% of clicks come from Position 2
- 9% of clicks come from Position 3
- 6% of clicks come from Position 4
- 4% of clicks come from Position 5
It’s easy to see why it’s important to get top search engine placement for your site.
It’s important to rank high for as many key phrases as possible
It’s a mistake to simply focus on a single key phrase – say, ‘self-employed mortgages in brighton’ – when there are others that could deliver traffic as well – ‘mortgage broker brighton’, ‘self employed mortgages sussex’ and so on.
This is why I look for key phrases that are already delivering people to Writing For SEO and are ranking lower than the top half of the first page of results on Google. I’m looking to get more traffic from them by getting them to higher search engine positions.
High Traffic key phrases and the Long Tail
With over 75% of Organic traffic, on average, resulting from clicks on the listings in the first three search engine positions, you can get more traffic from ranking highly for lower traffic (Long Tail) key phrases than lower for very popular key phrases. I’ll write more about the Long Tail sometime later, as I don’t want to go off in another direction here.
The key is to concentrate on attaining those high positions that deliver good percentages of the available traffic to your site. So you need to look for key phrases you can rank highly for and grab those high positions for yourself.
If you’re unsure how to find the key phrases that you can get high numbers of visitors, please ask me for a quote for key phrase research.