I just finished writing copy for one of my clients on the subject of search engine rank position and the traffic that flows to a website as a result of a high rank on SERPs (search engine results pages). I cautioned my client never to stand on one’s laurels, though.
Algorithms are regularly updated, search habits change, and the competition is always trying to elbow you out of position like basketball players boxing out for rebounds. Sometimes those elbows can be sharp.
Artists do not stop painting after they’ve produced their best work to date. They keep on painting, capturing on canvas what they feel in their souls, what they see in a landscape or a face, and what their heart says when it speaks. The same needs to be true for website owners, too. Having reached a top 10 rank position on Google one day is no guarantee of holding that spot the next.
You keep working the content of your site, adding blog posts with carefully curated keywords applicable to your business and for which you want to be found. Ranking well is only half of the equation – ranking well for the right keywords, those that your market uses in searches for which you want to be found, is the other half. Being found by people searching for widgets when in fact you sell kitchen appliances means nothing to your business, so you wouldn’t use the keyword “widgets” in your website content, for example.
That may be an extreme example, but it accurately illustrates the point. Ranking well for the right keywords that will bring the right traffic to your site is optimum.
Well-crafted copy optimized for the right keywords, joined with regularly practiced content growth with new blog posts, new pages, and even white papers, and regularly analyzed for performance, will go a long way toward helping you hold on to that hard-earned high rank on Google’s first page of search results. That high rank, in turn, will bring more carefully targeted traffic to your website. Follow that up with an analysis of what they did when they arrived and whether they converted from visitor to customer, and you have a good practice to maintain.
Don’t sit on past laurels. Highly-ranked positions on Google are not permanent. You must continually earn them.