Legal Marketing & PR

How Important is Page 1 Rankings in Search?

By Peter Boyd

It’s very important to rank high.  We are using the new Google Analytics Filter to see real time statistics of our search results.

Top Rankings
We have always ranked high for various terms, like “law firm web design”, “lawyer web design”, “Fort Lauderdale web design”, etc. We have always noticed a difference in inquiries when we have either risen in rankings from page 2 to page 1, or vice-versa a drop in inquiries.  However, we now have proof that rankings matter and bring in quality traffic.  I analyzed our Google Analytics from March 25 to April 1 (one week).

Raw Statistics
Here is the data of ONLY search traffic driven to our site:

Page 1 Visitors - 1,021

Page 2 and beyond Visitors - 56

Analysis
Suffice it to say that is a HUGE differential.  I thought it would be a 80% to 20% breakdown, but this is a whopping 95% to 5% difference. Even more telling is the page 2 and beyond search terms are very odd inquiries, very such as:

firefox “”network timeout”" “”the site”" test | page: 3
emails sent per day law | page: 3

I guess people get desperate when they get down to page 2, 3, 4, or even 100 (yes we had a visitor from page 100).

Conclusion
Basically, you can increase your sites traffic by 20 times simply getting Page 1 rankings in search.  Search matters and you should always consider SEO as part of your web presence plan.  Get your SEO consultant to install Google Analytics and the Filter for Conversion Tracking and see what traffic is coming into your site and from what page.

Full post as published by PaperStreet Web Design: SpeakOut on April 02, 2009 (boomark / email).