Dominating SERPS

January 2nd, 2009 by Scot, under Link Building. 2 Comments

When you’re marketing your product, whatever that may be, it’s important to rank highly in the SERPS for obvious reasons.

Having a #1 ranking vs #2 ranking for whatever your keyword may be could be  the difference in thousands of dollars of profit every month. A recent Cornell study paints an interesting picture about engine rankings.

As you can see the #1 result gets over 40% more click-through than the #2, and it drops significantly from there. This is the easiest way to improve your revenues… Since you have the possibility to double your traffic/income by putting the little extra effort it takes in to beating out the top dog.

Most People Stop at One
But what if you were not only ranked #1, but you dominated the first page of Google with every, or nearly every result leading back some way to your website? You would then be not only taking the first 50% of traffic by being #1, but also the next 15, next 5, etc. for every result.

For instance… search for “Problogger” and see what you find. Darren has done an outstanding job of using social media to dominate the first page with all sites that lead back to him. Try Shoemoney.

Although those two are both fairly specific inquiries, you can see how social media can really direct organic (free) targeted traffic to your landing pages from a multitude of outlets.

I’ve been doing some work building links for specific pages on my blog one being the Free Landing Page Templates post I did a few weeks back. Right now my post on Digg is just barely outranking the actual website (probably to do with this blog being relatively new).

I outsourced a few hundred blog comments to the page to get it indexed fairly quickly (Pinging w/in Wordpress does a great job of this as it is but I wanted to give it a bit more juice), used OnlyWire to post the story to most of the major bookmarking sites, and also put about 100 links from other smaller bookmarking pages. Within 2 days I was ranked #10/11 right behind landingpagetemplates.net and I will continue to build this particular page to the top of the SERPS. Digg has brought me roughly 100 organic visitors (about 25% of my traffic for this keyword this month) just from being ranked right below me.

So, go out and get the most social real estate allowed for your keywords. Take advantage of Wordpress.com, Edublogs, Hubpages, Squidoo, etc. The usual. If it’s free why not use it to put more outlets to your landing page in the SERPS? Don’t put the hope of all of your organic traffic in one basket.