Top SEO Rankings: It’s Not the Size of the Haystack
Often when talking to international or local clients and prospects about SEO, they mention their site shows up in the Top 10 search results for a particular phrase under which a million plus other results appear.
However, what many people fail to realize is that it is not the size of the haystack that matters, but rather the competitiveness of the website within it. For instance when’ typing “brown food” into Google, the blue search bar above the listings will include the text “Results 1 - 10 of about 125,000,000”, yet when “SEO company” is typed into the search box Google displays the following “Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000” (see the bottom of this post for an image).
What can we ascertain from this? The number of results is not of huge importance. Despite the fact that more results appear for “brown food” it is much easier for a SEM company or firm to optimize a site for this keyword phrase than “SEO company”. Why is this case? Simply, there is little value associated to the phrase “brown food”. Conversely, there is an enormous value in ranking number one for “SEO company”.
The bottom line is that even if a large number of results appear for a keyword phrase it does not mean that the phrase is competitive. Now, how does knowing this help when advertising on the internet? It helps dispel a fallacy that many less ethical or knowledgeable SEO sales people use when selling their services. When marketing a website, either on your own or with a company, it helps to know fact from the fiction. Hopefully this blog post will make it that much easier to separate the two if you are ever presented with this myth.
crazysem said,
September 15, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
I have found this to be quite true. It does not seem to matter how many pages appear when using SEO to improve a website’s rankings.