How good is your company’s search-engine visibility?

Regardless of your industry, business size or goals, your business needs to be easily found online in search. Why? With 6.5 billion searches per day, someone out there is bound to want your services in your location. But it goes beyond just customers. Potential investors and employees are out there searching, too. So how is your search-engine visibility?

In 2017, users expect personalized search results—and Google wants to deliver on that expectation. Which means it is your job as a website owner to make your site and services as visible as possible in the search results. Users think that the number one result is the best answer to their searched keyword, which is why position one has a click-through rate of almost 30%. That is more than double position two’s CTR, and the decrease only gets more dramatic the further down the list of results you go.

First page ranking

Every business has a set of keywords or phrases that are relevant to their products or services. For example, a staffing company in the Los Angeles area would want to show up for the search “staffing agency in Santa Monica.” Your search visibility status is based on the percentage of keywords you’re ranking for on Page One of Google. You want your site to come up on the first page of results for “staffing agency in Santa Monica—” otherwise you’re losing out on significant site traffic that could contribute a huge number of leads and sales.

Do you know your website’s search visibility? If your relevant searches aren’t showing up on page one (the top ten rankings for a keyword), you’re missing out on huge opportunities. The click-through rate on any ranking below seven is virtually non-existent, so it is vital that you optimize your content to rank for relevant keywords.

How do you achieve good search visibility? It starts with good website content: content which clearly states what products or services you offer and, if relevant, in what geographic area. More targeted content means more search visibility, which means more leads, which ultimately means more sales.

Geography matters

Targeted content means optimizing your content to show up in relevant searches. If you provide commercial roofing services on Long Island, NY, you want to show up for “commercial roof repair Long Island,” not “commercial roof repair NYC.” You can see why a roofing company on Long Island might show up for an NYC search—since the two are so close geographically—but if the content is targeted towards their specific service area in Nassau County, for example, users searching within that area are much more likely to see that company’s site come up in a Long Island-targeted search.

In analyzing 2000 small to medium-sized business websites, we found that not even one percent of them had a search visibility over 50%. This means many sites have a huge opportunity to win if they are optimized according to the most prioritized keywords for that business. Conversely, this indicates that the competition is high for ranking, so if you don’t develop a good online strategy, your company could get left in the dust.

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