And I have to say, it’s a big waste of time for you to focus all of your energy on ranking number 1 on Google for a specific term or even a handful of terms. The number 1 listing gets the majority of the traffic only 49% of the time. The common trend is people are focusing on the paid ads more than the organic listings. And organic listings are no longer guaranteed to be as high up as they once were. Overall organic traffic growth – keywords have trends and they change in popularity over time. Instead of focusing on a handful of keywords or even a few hundred, I just focus on increasing my overall organic traffic. There are a few SEO strategies I use to get more traffic that still work well today. Conclusion Yes, you want to continually improve your search traffic over time, but obsessing over whether or not a keyword is ranking number 1 doesn’t mean much. SEO has moved to a long-tail strategy. So, are you going to continue focusing on rankings?
Do you know what the number one email request I get is?
Come on, take a guess. What do you think it is?
Ok, its people asking me for money.
But, do you know what the second most common email request I get is?
Companies asking me to rank them number 1 on Google for a specific term.
And I have to say, it’s a big waste of time for you to focus all of your energy on ranking number 1 on Google for a specific term or even a handful of terms.
Just take a look at my site… here’s my Google traffic over the last 31 days:
As you can see from the graph, I’m generating 2,375,455 organic visits from search engines each month.
And can you guess how many keywords I’m tracking when it comes to my rankings?
A big fat ZERO!
I’m not saying I don’t do SEO, I’m saying I don’t focus on rankings.
Can you increase your search traffic without tracking rankings?
The short answer is yes.
As you saw from the graph above, I’m getting over 2 million visits from organic search each month. If you look back a year, I was getting 970,459 visitors a month from search.
In other words, I was able to grow my organic search traffic by 144% in roughly 12 months. That’s not too shabby considering I don’t focus on any one particular keyword.
So why don’t I focus on specific keywords or track my rankings?
Number 1 doesn’t guarantee the most clicks
Ahrefs recently did a study where they showed how being number 1 doesn’t guarantee the greatest number of clicks.
The number 1 listing gets the majority of the traffic only 49% of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I would rather be number 1 than number 2, but getting there doesn’t guarantee the most amount of traffic.
And over time it’s just going to get worse.
Just look at how SERP listing pages looked in 2014.
Now let’s look at how SERP listings look today.
What are the big differences that you see?
- Paid listings blend in – paid listings aren’t as clearly defined as they used to be. In other words, they blend in, which helps ads generate a higher percentage of the clicks.
- Localized listings can be ads – the first listing in the localized listing is also paid.
- The right side no longer has ads – most of the elements on the right side, when you click on them, drive you to perform another Google search.
- Less organic listings – the homepage only has 9 organic listings if you exclude the localized listings.
- Organic results are pushed down – not only do the paid and local listings show first, but news results are also in-between the organic results. This causes the 3rd, 4th, 5th… organic result to get fewer clicks.
The common trend is people are focusing on the paid ads more than the organic listings. And organic listings are no longer guaranteed to be as high up as they once were.
Just look at this eye tracking study of a Google SERPs result.
It clearly shows how the…
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