11 Comments on Why you have to rank #1 in natural search engine results

Blake on Tue, 27th Sep 2005 6:09 pm


Agreed. Trouble is getting naturally ranked at #1 in a commodity business might be even harder than a super bowl tv spot. (Not that you would want that.) Even worse, you can’t pay million’s for it.

Greg Haslam on Tue, 27th Sep 2005 6:09 pm


One must take these SEW and Jupiter Research reports with a grain of salt. Having worked in the industry and being witness to the actual numbers, they are more often wrong than right, and in some cases by an order of magnitude.

There is also one critical assumption made here which is that conversion to sale are the same from an organic or a paid search link. This is often times not the case. Traffic (leads) and sales are tweo different metrics.

Dave Martin on Tue, 27th Sep 2005 7:09 pm


I am on my school’s computer – so I went through Google to get to your site. I just noticed that you had moved from #3 for the term ‘Paul Allen’ to #2. Congrats Paul, you are one step closer to the top.

Colin Jensen on Wed, 28th Sep 2005 4:09 pm


As you said, the difficulty is in commodities. But barring the extremes, it’s not impossible to get on top of many phrases. I mean, “Paul Allen” is a real exception, because of the other guy. But most of us have no excuse not to be the #1 natural result for our name, if we have any inclination to such, simply because most of us don’t randomly have a billionaire fighting with us for the #1 spot. If you’re trying to be #1 for iPod, you need some serious (and seriously expensive SEO marketing people). But for the vast majority of us, we exist because we have a niche, and by definition, a niche doesn’t have a tremendous amount of competition.

Dustin Robertson on Sat, 1st Oct 2005 12:09 am


I think Seth Godin summed up organic search optimization best in this blog post

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/07/the_problem_wit.html

Basically if you can’t make money doing paid advertising then you don’t have business. Sad but true. That said we have dedicated resources to organic results.

Jason Carr on Sat, 1st Oct 2005 8:10 pm


Though it may be difficult (impossible?) to rank #1 for certain key terms, it is my experience that it is downright easy for established e-commerce sites to rank very well for large numbers of niche terms. In many cases, those niche terms convert to sales at a much higher rate than general terms because they are for specific items (‘pink plastic ipod cover’ instead of the aforementioned ‘ipod’).
Often a simple mod-rewrite to make an older database-driven site into a SE friendly one is enough to accomplish this task (and makes an investment in SEO very worthwhile).

John Jonas on Thu, 6th Oct 2005 4:10 am


Having ranked very highly for lots of very competitive keywords, I can vouch for what this study shows.

On multiple keywords my sites were twice as profitable when ranked #1 vs #2.
Same thing for being #2 vs #3.

On certain sites the difference was hundreds of dollars per day (like $300->$600).

Also, it is difficult to rank highly for competitive keywords, but not as difficult as it’s made out to be. You just have to realize that yahoo and msn traffic is just as good as is google traffic and that there’s just as much yahoo/msn traffic as there is google traffic. It’s much easier to get a #1 ranking on yahoo/msn than it is google and the traffic is usually more profitable traffic than is #1 google traffic (depending on your market of course).

If (for the time being…of course some day these other SE’s will catch up to where google is now) people would start optimizing for Yahoo and MSN, they’d find much more success.

internet cash flow business on Tue, 14th Mar 2006 3:03 am


Hello:

Your blog entry caught my eyes.

The mistake that most website owners and businesses are currently making is that they are depending on their traffics to come from search engines alone.

Some are even squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly doing PPC campaign.

This is fatal.

It is impossible for all websites to rank at #1 or among the top 10 all at once.

So, once businesses realize this obvious fact, it should be common sense for them to know that the solution should be to diversify their marketing and promotion.

Stop depending on the uncertain search engine traffic otherwise you’ll go bankrupt soon.

You need to do different kinds of marketing and promotions both online and offline.

Some of them are newspaper and magazine advertising, TV, cable and radio advertising, direct mailing promotion, text-link campaign, link exchange campaign, events sponsorship promotion, press release, article promotions.

And there are many softwares you can get to automate all this and make it easy. Visit: http://www.maychic.com/clickbankbuddy/index.cgi

When you do all these promotions, you get a lot of exposures, traffic from many sources and will not be forced anymore to depend on search engines traffic and rankings alone.

Dollarbliss
http://www.dollarbliss.com

fosseng.info » Blog Archive » Velger f on Wed, 17th Jan 2007 6:19 pm


[...] Dette tyder p

S on Tue, 23rd Jan 2007 11:54 pm


Ranking as number one is important, but you also have to focus on the users. Give them incentives to buy your product, and even more important make them come back to your site.

fosseng.info » Blog Archive » Velger første og b on Thu, 7th Feb 2008 6:16 pm


[...] alt for ofte. Forskningsresultatene som Nielsen viser til illustrerer for øvrig nok en gang viktigheten av søkemotoroptimalisering, da det helt tydlig er alfa omega å ligge som treff nr. 1 innenfor ditt [...]

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