The True Value of Google Top Rankings

Website owners and marketers have often asked me to explain the importance of Google rankings vis-￠-vis the prospect of their online businesses. In response, I have always stressed on the importance of Google rankings asserting that it is a powerful tool that can affect any online business immensely. To be precise, an online business may boom or go bust based on the websites position on Google.

As my response often fail to convince them completely, the marketers further query me about the exact value of a top ranking on Google and the benefits their businesses can derive from a top Google grade.

$37.7 million worth paid results daily

The earnings report published by Google in June 2008 shows that the sites owned by the search engine giant yielded revenues worth $3.40 billion primarily from the search results during 2008 Q1. Translated to daily earnings, this is a whopping figure -- $37.7 million a day!

Well, going by the above figures, it is not only easy to comprehend the importance of Google rankings, but also assess the worth of being listed on the search engines first result page. Even a layman would be able to tell that the advertisers would not cough up so much money if the Google rankings did not generate enough revenues for them. Googles huge earnings only signify the worth of the paid search results on its websites.

More value for listings in the natural search results

A recent study conducted by iProspect established that 60.5 per cent of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL users preferred the natural or unpaid search results to the paid search results for any pertinent inquiry. The study further found that while 72.3 per cent of Google search engine users selected natural search results as the most applicable, the figure was 60.8 per cent for Yahoo!

Moreover, researches conducted by Enquiro and iProspect exposed that while 60.5 per cent to 70.0 per cent of the Internet users have faith on natural results, only 30 per cent to 39.5 per cent of them rely on paid results. From the above findings we may conclude that an online marketer will receive more clicks with a natural search engine listing compared to the paid listing.

Interestingly, during the latter half of 2007, information related to an in-house Google tool that consigned dollar values to the search results on the website was let slip. On investigation, it was detected that news regarding the tool leaked while it was being used by the companys AdWords marketing team working on a project to facilitate the process of prioritising new client acquirement. Higher ROI from natural search results

The above illustration shows how a listing in the natural search result is of much more value when compared to the scheduling in paid results. The reasons behind this are: " Most Web surfers click natural search results regularly " Most Web surfers prefer and trust natural search results

It is an accepted fact that natural search results provide the major part of targeted traffic to any website, even now a large number of firms spend their entire online marketing budget on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programmes rather than investing in the more organic search engine optimisation (SEO) process.

It has been proved beyond doubt that compared to the PPC campaigns, optimising a website for top rankings in Googles natural search results offers much higher return-on-investment (ROI). Moreover, you are likely to get the value of your investment in search engine optimization more easily and quickly.

About The Author Macquarie IT is Australia based web development company providing internet marketing, search engine optimization, website design Australia, website development, Graphics designing services.