Should Number One Rankings be Your Main Goal

In some respects SEO ranking is not an exact science and it is better if you think that the rankings are a competitive race, and only the best can end up on the first page in SERPS, and there is a host of other companies just like you attempting to win the race.

The goal is that keywords and target phrases push your site to the best possible position, but there are changes happening that priorities may be changing in this direction. So the question arises are number one rankings as important as they always were.

Here at Voova Digital we have a dedicated digital marketing team that can help with advice what strategies you should implement. Perhaps look at our blog pages that have detailed articles and blogs about this very subject.

The Previous Philosophy

The priority for all SEO search terms used was number one position and this was because the number one position in SERPS would receive over thirty percent of the search traffic, with number two getting just over seventeen percent and the third just over eleven percent.

So making the assumption that all the pages had an equal amount of traffic it would be better to get a good number one ranking than two number three rankings and three number three rankings.

After the third position the numbers drop dramatically, so if you are attaining a number two ranking it would be worthwhile to try a little harder and attain the number one position.

Why Number One Rankings Have Dropped in Importance

Rankings for number one position have dropped in importance due to many reasons.

• SERP’S now throws up other alternatives to your Google requests, such as the local three pack or a knowledge graph box, or even an alternative answer that is set aside from SERPS. These new types of entries are weakening traditional organic number one rankings.

• Targeting Keywords is harder, this used to be the main factor in judging your organic SEO. Previously keywords with high traffic could be expanded upon to attain number one position. But today with semantic search growth the power of keywords as opposed to phrases is not as easy to differentiate. Today it is far harder to try to selectively target important phrases as Google tries to match up relevant content with user queries rather than the ten most exact text matches.

• Semantic searches have other important effects on SERP’s, perhaps a lengthy article on your site has attracted plenty of links, and in turn increases your site’s authority, which again makes it easier to rank your keywords. This in effect means that if you continuously produce good content you will by default also rank all manner of relevant keywords and phrases with even have to target them.

Click Through Rates Can Affect Rankings

CTR’s have a much closer relationship with search rankings than they used to have, there is a definite connection with CTR’s and higher rankings and it is mutually beneficial.

The higher rankings you achieve the more likely you will get clicks, and the more clicks your site receives then your site will be deemed more relevant and you will get higher in the rankings.

Having said all this a first ranked position does not guarantee a good click through rate, so you should not neglect the optimization of your site and the metadata, so your site appeals more to users.

The Value of Visitors Varies

Your site’s ultimate value is what your visitor does on it, and the value of your SEO campaign is that the appropriate actions are meaningful to you. If the visitor does not have meaningful actions with your site then being number one in the rankings doesn’t really matter.

Other strategies including good branding, conversion optimization, and user focus design all need to be strong on your site, otherwise the SEO strategy you have in place will not fall into place. You need a good balance between quantity and quality traffic.

So What Strategy Should You Implement?

So should you throw all your old strategies out of the window? The answer is a definite no, the purpose of this blog is to highlight that the landscape of SEO is changing. For some sites the old original SEO campaigns are still valid and some keyword targeting is worthwhile to attain the number one position.

But for others, you might achieve more valid response to your site and never achieve a number one position. Your best approach to a strategy is to be prepared to consider all possibilities of marketing your brand. Good SEO strategy in the modern world is to look at the overall picture and an understanding what strategies are available to use.