In today’s modern internet sales environment you need to ask yourself:

“ Will Front Page Rankings deliver the sales results I need ? “

The short answer is a resounding “No” but let’s elaborate a little on the question and then answer it. “Being on page 1 of Google”  is still a surprisingly common desire by “rookie” business website owners.

Whether it’s a new business, or a new website for an existing business, the number of people who think that if they could “just rank on the front page of Google” for a particular phrase they have in their minds, that all their problems would be over is still considerable.  .. But are superior rankings alone, enough any more?

..Consider the screenshot below.

Many people don’t even recognise the faintly pink area as an advert/s, and sometimes there are as many as 3 adverts there, so a legitimate #1 and #2 as shown above,  is already equivalent to #4 and #5, to these people.

And many SERPs these days have Local Business (maps) listings plus Videos, Images all around, so the choice  of destinations other than your site grows all the time.

So CTR (or Click Through Rates) starts to take even greater importance as even a #1 Organic ranking will probably have several enticing choices above and below it, and not even be all that clearly a #1 position to a non-techie searcher, and if you’re ranking below the fold on the browser there’s a good chance the searcher might not even SEE your listing.

So clearly, improving your click through rates on rankings that do get seen, so that the customer  (hopefully) clicks your site over and above the others all around you is not only the only way to improve traffic on a keyword when you can’t actually go any higher, but also it’s a great way to snipe traffic from above you from lower positions.

The Changing Face (& Workings) of Google.

If you’ve used Google in the last few weeks you can’t of helped noticing they have changed the look of their sacred interface quite dramatically, (leading incidentally to reports of less traffic  for some sites since the rollout) however that is not all they have changed, not by a long way.

As noted by several sites, Google caffeine is live – that is the new super-powerful infrastructure that Google runs on, and this has shaken lots of sites performance up in many different aspects, not just rankings.

We think perhaps the new version of Webmaster Tools is also Caffeine-powered because it’s pretty hyper compared to the last version and now gives far greater insight into your site’s traffic and performance across all Google indexes than has ever been available anywhere before, and now includes basic keyword CTR data, which although limited is more than we had before, and gives a reasonable indication to us that Google will likely be looking at this more and more as time goes on, perhaps even as ranking signals, finally.

What happens when they DO click my site?

Good question. Considering the ever increasing difficulty of ranking high enough to be seen,  and then of getting them to actually click yours, over your competition, what happens when one way or another a precious customer does find you? ie

Does the Website Convert (visitors into customers) ?

If it doesn’t, before you spend any more time and money worrying about SEO, you would be much better off spending some time and effort on either getting a decent site, or looking into improving the conversion rate of your current site, ie Conversion Rate Optimization.

Hence you can hopefully  see that Superior SEO in 2010 has far more wide-ranging connotations and responsibilities than ever before, and people who think that just  a front-page ranking for a keyword is all that is required to build a strong  online business don’t understand either Google, their competitors, and quite likely their own potential customers.