Why Ranking 1st on Google Isn’t Enough: Small Business Website SEO

There’s no feeling like being in first place. Being in the top spot in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! searches doesn't just feel good, it pays. The top spot on Google gets approximately 33% of the clicks for a particular search.

As it should be, a lot of importance is put on being in the top spot, or at the very least, being on the first page. After all, less than 10% of people searching in Google even click over to the second page.

In other aspects of life and business, once we reach a goal, we don't have to do anything else in order to get the benefits from it. For example, if you're working to pay off a credit card, after it's paid off, you don't have to keep making payments. With SEO, the work doesn’t stop after you’ve made the top spot, and here are three big reasons why:

Competition

Imagine you’re running a 5k and first place pays $10,000. You’ve trained for months and need the money to put your oldest child, Frank, through college. After just over two miles, you’re in first place, and as you look behind you, you can’t see any of your competitors. Do you stop and start walking, or do you keep running full speed with the belief that your competitors are coming up fast? Of course, you keep running so little Frankie can go to college.

Because the first position on Google is so valuable, your competitors are constantly running right behind you. Their business may even depend on getting there, which means they are highly motivated to find some way to beat you. You will always need to defend your spot at the top.

Search Engine Updates

What Google and other search engines want from you and how they value your site are ALWAYS changing. In the first three months of 2017, there have already been four major updates. All it takes is a small change in how they rank sites or what they accept or penalize, and your site could be knocked off the first page entirely.

External Factors

Your ranking largely relies on things that you can’t control. You can always work to improve your SEO, but you have no control over external links, how Google ranks websites, and how your target market is searching and clicking on search engine results.

The websites that link to your website, for example, impact your search rankings. You can influence their decision to add one of your links to their website by working with them and providing them value (like writing a great article their readers want to read). What you can't do is control how they manage their website, add and remove links, and how they go about their own SEO efforts, which will impact yours.

Because of external factors like links on other websites and search engine updates, as mentioned above, you can lose ground when you’re standing still and not even realize it if you aren’t continuing to work on SEO for your website.

Stick With It!

About four years ago, I was told by a great client, "We're at #1, and we think we are wasting our money." I was sad to see them go and explained that even without our help here at Mavidea, they would need to keep up their SEO efforts.

We did continue to work together, but it was after a costly year where they fell off of the first page of search results for several of their keywords because they stopped all of their SEO work.

It’s okay to adjust your approach once you've reached the top spot, but you can’t just stop. Nothing in search engine optimization is "set it and forget it." Your efforts need to be constant if you want to stay at the top and enjoy the benefits that come with sticking there, like visitors and sales.

Are you in first place and would like some help making sure you stay there? Or maybe you're getting close, but need a little extra help in getting to #1. For a free 15-minute strategy call, send me an email with a link to your website: Jason.Lerblance@mavidea.com