Dave Naffziger's Blog

Matt McGee of Small Business SEM wrote a brilliant post on the the value of occupying the first search position. Here’s a graph detailing click share against position:

I guess we all intuitively understood this, but I was shocked that the top position saw 10x the traffic of the fifth position (which is still above the fold).

Shotguns and Sniper Rifles

I think that this suggests a lot about SEO strategy. JB receives lots of long-tail search traffic. Our approach towards SEO has been largely on-page optimization - we haven’t undertaken any linkbuilding efforts. We’ve aggregated a lot of our reviews into topically relevant pages that would be easy to link to, but we’ve largely taken a build it and links will come approach.

This data makes me rethink that strategy. Anecdotally, I know that we rarely rank in the top position, although we frequently make the top 5. I wonder if the next step would be to take a look at our long tail organic traffic and determine the rank of those terms. It would be simple to determine an ‘upside’ from this data and develop a much shorter list of terms to focus on. I’m curious what focused link building could do for some of those terms. It seems like something worth experimenting with.