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Last week, while chatting with fellow speakers and attendees at SMX Advanced, I had a sudden epiphany: Search engine marketing specialists are concentrating too much on page one search results. Having started in the search industry ten years ago, it never occurred to me that many of today’s search marketers frequently, if not always, regard pages found on the second, third or subsequent pages of the SERPs as failures.
In my mind, that’s a dangerous way to look at the situation. Page one results are certainly a great goal, but there’s more than one way to measure SEO success—and disregarding results in the 11 – 50 range is an enormous mistake. Search marketers need to change the way that they think, and look at these ‘next page’ results as the opportunity that they truly represent—not as a source of constant frustration.
So what’s the opportunity? One word: localization. The results on pages two, three and four are prime candidates for local search optimization. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that exact topic in a near future blog post.
Richard Zwicky is the founder and President of Enquisite, a leading search analytics firm. He’s been actively involved in search marketing since 1998, and is a regular speaker at conferences worldwide.
Great observation! I whole heartly agree that many search marketers, even though they go after long tail keyword terms, they neglect analyzing and reporting against the long tail click.
However, considering some companies only employee 1-2 search professionals and their time is limited; to really concentrate on only ~3-5% of your overall traffic. It’s hard to justify.