Do You Need To Be No.1 In The Search Engines To Attract Your Most Qualified Prospects?
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Could it be that we don’t really need to get the first spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) in order to attract our most qualified prospects i.e. the supposed 20 percent of prospects who generate 80 percent of sales?
Well, some research from MarketingSherpa indicates there might be some truth in this…
In a recent study, MarketingSherpa found that certain kinds of search engine users are prepared to wade through more SERPs than one might normally expect. It found that among industrial engineers:
- 14 percent just looked at the first few results on the first page of results;
- 39 percent looked at the first page of results;
- 10 percent stopped looking after the second page of results; and
- 37 percent looked through more than two pages of results.
MarketingSherpa reckons these findings would be typical of niche searchers. Presumably, anyone highly motivated to find uncommon (i.e. niche) information is more inclined to look through more pages of results than other kinds of searchers.
Given that search engine optimization (SEO) - like anything - comes at a cost, it *may* follow that at a certain point it may no longer be cost-effective to keep striving to become number in the SERPs, simply because niche prospects are prepared to look through more results anyway.
Maybe…
