How Higher Search Engine Rankings Can Help Your Business

Higher search engine rankings: They're supposed to be invaluable to your business. Below, find out what they are, exactly, and how they help.

More visibility: Basically, increasing your search engine rankings mean that your site is higher up on the search engine lists than it used to be.

When someone gets onto Google or Yahoo! and searches for Eskimo pudding, they get a list of web pages that include those words. The order of the web pages isn't random, however the very first link on the list is the one that Google or Yahoo! (search engine) thinks is the best match for what you're looking for. The second link is supposedly the second best match; the third link is the third best match, and so on.

Better rankings don't depend solely on how relevant your page is to the search terms. Search engines also take into account factors such as how popular your site is. A really popular site about Eskimo pudding, the reasoning goes, probably addresses the subject better than its competitors, and therefore the site gets a higher search engine ranking.

Unfortunately, a great many searches return hundreds of thousands of results, and hardly anyone is going to look through all of those. In fact, people drop off exponentially after the first and second pages; hardly anyone gets to the tenth or twelfth pages.

In other words, the higher up you are on the list, the more likely you are to be seen by people searching for your products or services.

More visitors to your site: Higher rankings create more than just better visibility. When your site is easier to find on the Internet, more people are bound to click on your link in the search engine results. As a result, you get more visitors to your site.

More sales: If you don't know what a conversion ratio is, that is the number of visitors to your site that buy something. Unfortunately, conversion ratios are typically not very high. Many sites claim that about one percent conversion is average. That means that only one out of every 100 visitors to your site actually become customers.

There are things you can do to increase your conversion ratio, but another approach is simply to increase the number of visitors to your site. If you get two times the visitors, you will theoretically have two times the sales; if three times the visitors, then three times the sales; and so on. Since a better rank means more visitors, then your traffic increase should in turn bring more sales, as well.

More benefit: As you can see, the benefits of higher search engine rankings are fairly simple: Greater visibility in the search engine leads to more visitors, more visitors lead to more sales. And of course, more sales mean more income for you and greater success your business. Once you understand this simple formula, you can see why it is advantageous to work on achieving higher search engine rankings for your website.