There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings – Site
There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
David Leonhardt, SEO Consultant
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential clients come to me with a single goal: "Get me a top-ten ranking at Google." Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them.
It is time to separate fact from fiction.
Yes, your SEO consultant can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But...
If the placement is for "dirty brown shoes", it probably wont help your shoe store one bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually searching for that term.
Being number ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching for "Essential Nectar liquid vitamins", will probably click on the first result they see, or at least on one of the "above-the-fold" results that do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for "liquid vitamins" might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself with the options available.
If your title tag reads like a cheap list of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: "vitamins, liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins", you might skip over it in favor of the next result that reads "Liquid vitamins from the Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store".
If your description tag is a mess, people will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for. Google and others use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.
I recently responded to a forum question, which went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has this percentage marketshare. Can I expect this many visitors
Thats not an SEO challenge; thats a math problem: searches x marketshare = visitors
I responded with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including the sites title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title tags and description tags of the competition, too.
Another factor that makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor