SEO Rankings
Ranking highly in the SERPs* or search engines is important for vendors competing in markets where there is sufficient search volume to yield greater than 20% of a firms online derived revenues via organic search traffic. This is an important distinction to make and one that I all too often see ignored – many companies either blindly embrace or ignorantly ignore the possibilities of organic search volumes and the associated marketing benefits.
Search engines are highly logical and highly scalable entities. By this I wish to communicate that the application of mathematical logic should instruct all search engine related marketing activities – again an area that is much negated by the standard “agency model” search engine optimization practitioners. Statistical forecasting models need to be run on the scale of potential gains before anyone can say with certainty that these gains are of a magnitude worthy of the invest in appointing an SEO company or practitioner to seek ranking gains on your company domain’s behalf.
This calculation is near impossible to run without finding credible data on what percentage of searches a given ranking is likely to yield. Surprisingly, the most credible data we have on this area – from 22 million iterations of real-world searches – would indicate that only 22.9% of searchers click through to the #1 ranked organic placement for a given search term. This is not something that your garden-variety SEO company is too terribly keen on exposing to a marketplace whose ignorance is its (the SEO “professionals”) lifeblood and rate-limiting factor.
Planning pays.... in SEO/SEM as in the real world
Below I have compiled some illustrative examples of how to best ascertain what level of investment you should be willing to make in organic search (if any).