What It Mean$ To Be #1

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is too often given less attention than it deserves in website design. That’s unfortunate because time invested up front on optimizing a site for search engines can have a tremendous payback. That is made abundantly clear in this post from ProBlogger. The story relates how a site that popped up #1 on Google organic rankings for a certain search term was getting approximately 30,000 visits per day. When they dropped to being the #2 ranked site, their visits went from 30,000/day down to 12,000/day—a 60 percent decrease! Just think what a difference that could make in sales.

Obviously, not everyone can always be #1 on Google, but it does dramatically emphasize the importance of showing up high in the organic rankings. Often people characterize search engine marketing as “paid search” or “free search.” This does a great injustice to organic SEO because as this iMedia story points out, it is not free and in fact may give your company the highest ROI of any marketing investment. Just like good PR is not free, neither is good SEO. It takes a well-planned effort to make it work. When it does, the return can be phenomenal.