The last article discussed the best ways of driving your website up the search engine rankings and we now want to look at the importance of position in the rankings and what it means in terms of traffic.

There is no doubt that traffic is directly proportional to the position your site holds in the rankings but do you know just how much difference even a couple of places movement actually makes? If you are not on the front page for a given search term then you will find that traffic is generally very low level. If you think about this you should not be too surprised. Think about your own search habits. You type in a given search term and then scan the results for something which relates to what you are actually looking for and which seems to answer your needs. How often do you bother to look at even the second page? We are guessing that you certainly would never bother scrolling down as far as the third page. Sound familiar?

So let’s assume you are on the first page at position number 10. You decide you want to put in some work to drive it up to the top half or top five positions on the page. How much difference will this make to the level of traffic you experience? Would it surprise you to know that a move to position 5 would probably result in a tenfold increase in traffic? As a general rule of thumb, the first position website will get approximately 40% of the available clicks for a given search term while a website at position 10 will get less than 1% of the clicks! See what a difference this makes?

It follows that obtaining a top three position in the search engine rankings is paramount and well worth the effort. Remember that organic traffic emanating from the search engines is free and long lasting, unlike pay per click paid traffic. This is what makes the work to drive your site up the rankings worthwhile and potentially very profitable. Once you have that coveted number 1 position, its normally pretty easy to stay there and this means that you maximise the traffic to your site and with traffic comes the inevitable sales and profit. It’s simply a numbers game and if you learn to pay the game you will make money!