Let’s face it, the purpose of your website is to market you, and the purpose of marketing is to make more money. The purpose of our blog is to shoot you straight on what it takes to get from wherever you are, to more sales.

Let’s dive in.

THE RABBIT HOLE

SEO is a ridiculously deep topic. Google looks at 200+ factors in determining your ranking in their search engine; your site’s security, the age of your site, geography, the time users spend on your site, the relevance of your site to the search keywords, the amount of trustworthy sites that link to your site, the meta data hidden in the background of your site, whether your site’s images are properly indexed, whether your site is mobile friendly or not, which can affect your ranking on mobile searches, and so much more.

And there are so many people dumping millions of pages onto the internet every day. It’s very difficult to land in a high position for a keyword that everyone is searching for, but even obscure search terms produce a sea of results.

We turned up 96,000 results for “The nature of the speed of light and it’s impact on quantum physics in Springfield mo.” Think you’ll be able to just toss up a site and rank first for “insurance agent” right away? Not a chance.

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

So that was the appetizer. Ready for the main course? All of people searching the internet every day have no patience. In fact, the Brain Statistics Research Institute stated that the average attention span in 2015 was slightly lower than that of a goldfish.

That being said, you can figure that very few search engine users are going to look at anything past the first few options.

There have been plenty of studies that prove how far the average person actually looks when searching on Google, but we’ve not found one so thorough as this study by data scientist Frank Kelly.

BREAK IT DOWN

In the above graph, the Blue lines represent searches for brands (such as Amazon, Crest, or Jonesen) conducted from a desktop computer.

The Green lines represent the same searches conducted from a mobile device.

Yellow lines show results from non-brand searches (such as shop online, toothpaste, or web design) conducted on a desktop computer.

Orange lines are the same non-brand searches on a mobile device.

Now let’s break down what those lines mean for you:

Are your clients looking for you specifically, or for your industry? We’ll use Jonesen as an example.

Let’s say local businesses are looking for “web design branson mo”. That’s a non-brand search. Being a business, let’s say they’re searching from their office desktop. Jonesen is the top result, meaning that we enjoy 21.4% of all of the clicks for that type of search.

What would happen if we were just 2 positions lower, listed as the 3rd result? We’d only get 10.9% of the traffic from that search. Less than half!

What if we weren’t so awesome at SEO, and we ended up as the first search result, but on the second page? 2.2%

We might get a couple of clicks every month or so, but that’s not going to give us a lot of opportunities to stand out in the crowd.

This is just a sample of what could happen.

AN IMPERFECT SCENARIO

So what if your market is looking for your brand, but you’re not the top result? Say you’re on the first page, but you’re only the fifth result, and your competitor is first.

Your competitor is getting more than 6 times (40.2% vs 6.6%) the clicks your site is getting, even though the searches were for you!

It’s not fair, but this is war.

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

“I’m on the second page! That’s pretty good, right? Out of the hundreds of thousands of results, I’m in the top 20!”

Unfortunately, very few people are desperate enough to spend the time it would take to look that far.

3.5% is the best you can really hope for. That’s if you’re the third to last result for a non-brand search conducted on a smart phone. 3.5% of traffic is not likely to pay the bills.

Notice how the information doesn’t list anything past the 20th rank? If you haven’t landed in the top 20 spots, you’re invisible. In fact, if you’re a brand in spot 17 or 20, and your searcher is on a mobile device? Don’t expect any hits.

DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY

There is hope for you and your site! A lot of businesses don’t really optimize their site for SEO. They don’t practice on page optimization, and even fewer practice off page optimization. Partly because few know the technical ins and outs of effective SEO.

Don’t worry about it. You do what you do best. Run your company, and leave the SEO to us.

These are things we want to help you understand. We want to give you the tools to get better search engine rankings, more traffic, higher conversion rates, and more sales.

But if you’re the type that wants results without trudging through the muck, we’ve got your back. Shoot us an email, and we’ll take care of it for you.

Sources:
https://www.jonesen.com/blog/why-mobile-friendly-is-a-must/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/
http://www.analyticsseo.com/blog/seo-click-through-rate/