Using Google rankings to sell?
I was curious the other day about Utah custom home builders so I did a search for “utah custom home” on Google.
Note: I have absolutely no affiliation with any company in this space.
I clicked on the first result, ultimatehomesutah.com, and was surprised to see that they actually advertise on their home page:
Ranked #1 on Google for Luxury Homes in Utah
I did a search for “luxury homes in Utah” and, sure enough, they were #1. That got me thinking, though - what if they lose their ranking? I mean, that wouldn’t look good, right, claiming #1 if they didn’t have it?
Also it drives home a suspicion I have always had about people’s perception of Google - people think that a high-ranking site is more credible because Google is “voting for it.”
This is not the case - Google’s rankings are determined a mathematical formula, or algorithm, but that doesn’t really matter if people think that a high ranking denotes more authority.
A local Utah company (a sometimes competitor of our Utah SEO company) really drives home the point that rankings don’t matter. I strongly disagree with this - not only do high ranking sites drive higher levels of traffic (they claim that traffic doesn’t matter, just the conversion rate) but, from what I’ve seen, they convert better as well.
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Yeah, the ones who claim traffic and rankings don’t matter say that because they don’t know how to get the top rankings, so they don’t know any different, or they’re just trying to smooth-talk their clients into sticking with them regardless of results.
There may be some truth to the “rankings don’t matter” argument–if you consider that you could have top rankings for a bunch of crappy keywords, but they won’t drive any traffic if no one is searching on them. Rankings for the RIGHT keywords do matter.
Also, regarding conversion rates, of course conversion rates are important, but I’d rather have a conversion rate of 1% on 1 million visits than a 100% conversion rate on 100 visits–so yeah, traffic matters.
Comment by Dave Bascom — May 8, 2007 @ 9:37 am