A: Maybe. If your niche or industry is pretty chill, then you’ll hang out near the top of the list. But as soon as someone else comes along wanting to be on Page 1 as well, then you’re going to have to prove that your website deserves to be ranked higher than your competition.
So for some of our clients, we did our fundamental SEO work on their website, and they are happy to ascend to Page 1 in less than a year of launch. If they see that they lose their spot, they’ll be back to talk about winning back their spot. This is when we will begin a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. (More on that later).
Q: Is this an arms race? In order to stay on Page 1, we always have to invest more than the competition?
A: Yes. But don’t forget what this is about–getting new customers! So it’s easy to invest in keeping your spot in the Google search results because this means that you get more traffic from new customers. So it’s an easy investment to make.
Also, know that you can lose your spot all on your own. One of our clients changed their homepage to be more stylish and minimal, and they dropped off Page 1 and onto Page 2 on Google’s search results. Why? Because the homepage that we built for our client was well-structured and loaded with metadata that Google totally understood. Their new homepage is beautiful, yes, but it’s opaque to Google.
Next: “Tell me more about keywords and key phrases. Shouldn’t this be super obvious?“