What is a top search result showing worth to your business

What is it worth to your company to show up in the top search results for your type of services or products? Shouldn’t that be the primary goal of your website? Shouldn’t your website market you, rather than you having to market your website?

Many of us make decisions about our website without first determining the primary goals for having a website. Instead we chose what seems pretty or something similar to our competition. I have nothing against pretty, but it is subjective and difficult to use for the evaluation of results. And I think it is very good to have better results than your competition, so don’t automatically do what they do either. Doesn’t it make sense that a primary goal should be improved marketing through high search results?

What do I mean by high search results? Just this, “high placement based upon likely generic search phrases“. For example, it is not significant to rank high on a search term like “love story wedding videography Miami” because really how many brides would be searching on a phrase that specific? Virtually none! What is important is a generic phrase like “Miami wedding videography”. That is an almost universal type phrase used by many South Florida brides seeking video services. And would result in a lot of website visitors for any videographer ranking high based on that phrase.

Let’s examine some of the other benefits of high search results, besides increased visitors. How about greater credibility, allowing for higher margins? Yes! Two recent studies have found that surprising outcome related to placing higher in search page results. First a report from iProspect revealing that “top rankings in search results transmit brand value to fully one-third of online consumers” and second this comprehensive study out of the University of Indiana titled “In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance” that had this finding

“An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google’s result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position … This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine’s tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.”

So a wedding business that has a high search ranking with generic search terms can also have higher brand value making for higher income margins. Not only will high search rank provide more business, it helps support higher prices. Here is an example from an article titled “What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?”.

Even better, how about an example from a successful wedding photographer? Many of us have heard of Houston wedding photographer Christine Tremoulet of Houston TX. Her photography is gorgeous. Christine has put the lesson of high search ranking to work by using the ideal of a WordPress based web/blogsite (with Flash limited only to portfolio galleries) that gets tremendous search rank and traffic. We can see this because she has also generously chosen to share her recent site activity through her site tracker. (Thankfully for the rest of us, true market leaders and innovators like Christine are almost always willing to share with the rest of the profession). If you take a look at the tracker you can see that her website regularly gets over 200 visits a day, with 50%+ coming from Google searches. Her largest single search term … “Houston”. Google “Houston wedding photographer” and she will almost always come up in the first page or two of results. And not because of costly Google Adwords, but free natural search. All this helps allow not only for a lot inquires, but also fees sufficient for a good income. That is the purpose of good marketing. Learn from leaders, she does not market her website, her website markets her.

So when trying to determine what to use for your website; if income is important to you, I recommend you chose what will get you the highest search results … a WordPress based web/blogsite.