Does a #1 Ranking on Google Equal Success?

By Aisling M. Brennan
Account Director

What does holding the top slot in Google mean to you? Is it the Holy Grail of your online search strategy? Does it equal success for your company? Well, apart from delivering a significant amount of traffic to your site, according to a recent survey a number one ranking can also convey success and market prominence to potential customers. In fact, according to Jupiter Research, more than a third of search engine users believe those web sites that appear at the top of the search results pages are the prominent companies in their field, in size or success.

Of course us Search Engine marketers, know that the reality is very different. In fact, it couldn't be farther from the truth.

The organic (or natural) search engine results reflect the degree of relevance of a web site to a particular search query; not the importance of a particular company within its sector. Those ranking highly in the search engines could just as easily be small and obscure companies, as large multi-million dollar brands, as long as they have web sites that appeal to the search engine algorithms.

What is listed at the top of the results depends entirely on how relevant that particular page is to the search query entered by the user. For example, a search in the travel category could return a listing for travel giant, Expedia, or display an obscure travel site in Western Ireland. It depends on how the search query is phrased.

So, how exactly does a search work?
Each search engine has a program (or spider) that crawls the web, finds sites and reads their content. The information found is then indexed by the search engine. When a user conducts a search, the search engine's algorithm sifts through the millions of pages listed in the index, looking for matches to the search query entered and ranks the sites by relevancy on the search engine results page.

Only those web sites savvy enough to appeal to the engines algorithms will rank highly. It has nothing to do with how much market share your company has captured, or how deep your marketing pockets are. It's purely about how search engine-friendly your web site is: how relevant and readable the text-based content is; the number of relevant, inbound links; the presence of unique Meta Data; how search engine-friendly the site architecture is (See related article on .Search Engine Optimisation 101) Only those companies with substantial search marketing strategies in place will appeal to the algorithms and achieve the holy grail of a first page ranking on Google or Yahoo!

And not only will this bring relevant, pre-qualified traffic to your site, but it can also equal success or market dominance to a potential customer. How powerful is that?