SEO is a zero sum game

What do I mean by that? What this means is that when one site moves to a #1 ranking, another site moves to #2. If you move up, then you have eaten your competition’s lunch. Like Daniel Day Lewis’ character in the movie There will be Blood says, “I drink your milk shake! I drink it up!”

Moving your site up in rank directly relates to traffic growth. Google spilled the goods a couple times, and some smart people translated those findings into the value of rank and how it translates into traffic. By moving your site from 6th to #1 you can effectively drive 10x more traffic to your site. 

On a chart comparing our competitors to the site I was working on I saw an interesting phenomenon: as the client’s site moved up a particular competitor moved down in an almost mirror image in the charts. I could see that we were “stealing” rank from the competitor. It was clear to me that this is also what I had to watch out for: If your competitors are doing SEO and you are not, Search Engines will unapologetically weed your site out of existence. 

 And if you were not on the first page of results, you might as well be nonexistent. Scratch that: If you are not in the top 3 positions your site may as well be nonexistent. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? What users place into the search field is a question, and if that question is answered in the #1 site returned why would they click on #2?

Posted on May 27th, 2008 | By: wangzen | Filed under Thinking about SEO

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