Being in the top 5 is nice, but not essential…
OK, so the ultimate aim of any SEO effort is to get the page in question to appear in the top 5 of the SERPS and ideally to appear first for a certain keyphrase. There are rumours doing the rounds at the moment that suggest that Google may be reducing page 1 of the SERPS to 5 results instead of 10 to make way for ‘new features’ which tend to back up this belief, but that is another blog topic entirely.
In certain industries, and for certain keyphrases, landing in the top 5 can be a tall order. You may be in the situation where you are being outgunned by factors such as the age of the competitor site and the maturity of the backlinks - things you are never going to compete with if you’re dealing with a relatively new website.
So is the battle lost?
Statistics suggest otherwise. It is widely believed (and common sense bears this out) that users who are prepared to go further down the SERPS to pages 2 and 3 will be more likely to convert and are arguably more valuable visitors to your site. It is believed that around 18% of searches restart their search after viewing result page 1, 25% restart after viewing page 2 and around 16% will go all the way to page 3 before abandoning and restarting their search. That’s a considerable amount of searchers that are willing to go beyond the elusive top 5 results.
I’m not saying that appearing further down the rankings is somehow better than being number 1, what I am saying is that sometimes we obsess far too much about the top spot and some good traffic can be generated from results further down the rankings.
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