2 Google Position Questions

[pokerextras]

1. Would you rather be number 1 for a 1k exact monthly search keyword, or middle of page one for five different 1k exact monthly search keywords. I guess what i'm basically asking is will the number 1 position bring you five times as much traffic as the number 5 position. Question 2. Would you rather be number 1 for a 1k exact monthly searches keyword, or middle of page one for a 20k exact monthly searches keyword. Again, i guess i'm asking how important is position 1. The reason for these questions is that i'm going to start targeting ten different full tilt phrases, and i think that it'll take me the same amount of time and effort to get to page one for all ten of them, as it'll take me to get to number 1 for just one of them. Which would be more profitable? I'm also position 6 for a 20k monthly searches term, but i'm getting very little traffic from it. Would i be better spending my time to rank higher for that term, or should i move on to the ten (or one) full tilt terms?

[Hazo]

I think there is a high percentage of visitors that only click on the top 3 results. Michael Martinez will be able to jump in here. From memory the percentage is around the 80% mark.

On that basis, I would rather rank top for the 1k search query.

[PokerDude]

Hard to answer your question, unless I know how popular the keywords are. # 5, at some traffic, is better than # 1, at no traffic, if that # 1 is an infrequently used keyword term. I think you get the idea....

[pokerextras]

Hard to answer your question, unless I know how popular the keywords are. # 5, at some traffic, is better than # 1, at no traffic, if that # 1 is an infrequently used keyword term. I think you get the idea....

the monthly search traffic is included in the original post

[Ridge]

Here is the thing, you want to rank for as many terms as possible, and rank as best as possible. any term you try and rank for you want to be #1, obv that is not always possible due to budget or w/e -

Ranking #1 is very important, or as Hazo said top 3 is very important for some terms. PokerStars terms, Full tilt terms will make bank if you rank in the top 5 for example. But Ideally you have your BIG kw's and then your secondary kw's -

That being said, ranking for 1000 terms to me is better and has more value than ranking #1 for only 1 term. (I can think of a few terms this is not true for, these terms will make you rich) but there isn't very many and most are out of reach for 99% of affiliates.

In order to be stable which is the goal of any business, you need to diversify and not be dependent on 1 term making you all your money. Because if the term is really that good, you will be in a constant battle to stay #1. If you lose that battle then what?

If I were you I would do this:

Plan out your content and target phrases - Attack each phrase one at a time and create the very best content you can for those terms. Make sure your pages are the best! Then move on to the next target phrase. Generally your pages need some age and of course a few links to get up there. So while you are monitoring their performance, you can be attacking the next term. Repeat this method for everything on your site.

What you will find is you will not only rank for your target phrase, but you will gain a lot of LT kw's that you can expand on and attack. What usually happens to me is that I find some nice LTKW's to target I had not thought of yet. These LTKW's are usually easy to rank #1 for and if you do this say 10x - then you have just stabilized your website with good kw's, good content, and a logical resource for your visitors. Best of all you will have found great kw's that convert traffic without having to spend 5k on links and only have one #1 ranking to show for it.

Hope this all makes sense, I'm living on 3 hours sleep lol so I might be rambling. hope this helps

[pokerextras]

Here is the thing, you want to rank for as many terms as possible, and rank as best as possible. any term you try and rank for you want to be #1, obv that is not always possible due to budget or w/e -

Ranking #1 is very important, or as Hazo said top 3 is very important for some terms. PokerStars terms, Full tilt terms will make bank if you rank in the top 5 for example. But Ideally you have your BIG kw's and then your secondary kw's -

That being said, ranking for 1000 terms to me is better and has more value than ranking #1 for only 1 term. (I can think of a few terms this is not true for, these terms will make you rich) but there isn't very many and most are out of reach for 99% of affiliates.

In order to be stable which is the goal of any business, you need to diversify and not be dependent on 1 term making you all your money. Because if the term is really that good, you will be in a constant battle to stay #1. If you lose that battle then what?

If I were you I would do this:

Plan out your content and target phrases - Attack each phrase one at a time and create the very best content you can for those terms. Make sure your pages are the best! Then move on to the next target phrase. Generally your pages need some age and of course a few links to get up there. So while you are monitoring their performance, you can be attacking the next term. Repeat this method for everything on your site.

What you will find is you will not only rank for your target phrase, but you will gain a lot of LT kw's that you can expand on and attack. What usually happens to me is that I find some nice LTKW's to target I had not thought of yet. These LTKW's are usually easy to rank #1 for and if you do this say 10x - then you have just stabilized your website with good kw's, good content, and a logical resource for your visitors. Best of all you will have found great kw's that convert traffic without having to spend 5k on links and only have one #1 ranking to show for it.

Hope this all makes sense, I'm living on 3 hours sleep lol so I might be rambling. hope this helps

It does . I agree totally. I guess i just had to hear it from somebody else to gain the conviction to follow through.

[Michael Martinez]

The more popular a query becomes, the more likely its search data is being polluted by rank-checking (both manual and automatic). People don't normally click through when checking rankings and if they do they are virtually guaranteed to NOT do business with competitors.

Hence, there are no reliable models for estimating how many click-throughs to expect from search rankings. A lot of people have analyzed data that AOL accidentally released in 2006 to estimate click-through percentages but they don't factor out all the inflationary elements so their predictions don't work.

Another factor that limits the usefulness of these prediction models is that in a crowded name space people are looking for specific "brand" values and will regularly pass over the top results if they are obviously incorrect.

A search on my name shows my personal Website first, but that site receives only a small fraction of the traffic that the AOL-based models predict because most people who search on "michael martinez" are actually NOT looking for me -- they are looking for someone else named "michael martinez".

That principle holds true in any query where you have competing brand values, and I would say most highly competitive affiliate markets have competing brand values.

Hence, Randy's approach will work more effectively for you in the long-run because it's based on an effective, well-established biofeedback principle. You test everything and enhance only what works, ignoring the overly simplistic statistical models and their nonsense predictions.

[pokerextras]

It's funny that you mentioned the aol statistics Michael. I found them a couple of days ago, and the math i get from them seems quite accurate. Here they are if anybody is interested. SERP Click Through Rate of Google Search Results – AOL-data.tgz – Want to Know How Many Clicks The #1 Google Position Gets? - Red Cardinal . Here's some very simple math. Adwords says that rakeback gets 22,200 searches per month. Those statistics say that position 6 will get 3.99% of the traffic, or 886 unique visitors per month. That's roughly what i'm getting from position 6 for rakeback. On an entirely unrelated note, at a 2% conversion rate, that should get 17 or 18 sign ups per month, which isn't alot considering the amount of work it takes to get to page one. The multiple long tail model seems far more efficient.

[Michael Martinez]

... Here's some very simple math. Adwords says that rakeback gets 22,200 searches per month. Those statistics say that position 6 will get 3.99% of the traffic, or 886 unique visitors per month. That's roughly what i'm getting from position 6 for rakeback....

There are bound to be cases where the models come close to reality.

However, I'm curious about how you track your search referrals. Most people use Google Analytics, which notoriously UNDER reports traffic. It also doesn't report all traffic from other search engines.

Do you monitor server logs? Do you track traffic from other search engines?

The AOL data very closely approximates Google search results as Google has powered AOL search for many years and AOL usually only just slightly filters the Google data (their safe search mode seems to be better than Google's).

I don't find much similarity between AOL/Google referral patterns and those from Bing/Yahoo!.

Just curious. I'm not trying to dispute or disprove what you say. With billions of queries, there is no need to try to carve out egotellectual niches in the data.

[Randy Ray]

It depends on the phrase and how well the pages address the query too. I had a page rank #11 in MSN for a phrase that got more traffic from MSN because the top 10 results there sucked than it did in Google at #5. The difference was that the top 4 results in Google actually answered the user's question. There are no absolutes in SEO.