Why Search Engine Rankings Matter

You may have noticed we haven’t written a blog post in a few weeks. Once every two years we write an Olympics blog– one for the Winter Olympics and one for the Summer Olympics (this one hasn’t yet undergone a facelift– look for that soon). For a couple of weeks every two years, every spare moment is spent watching and writing about the Olympics. What does that have to do with your Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? Keep reading, and I’ll let you know.

In the current age of Pay Per Click, it can become easy to ask– does it matter where I rank? After all with the right PPC manager, I can appear on the front page any day I want. That may be true and, certainly, given enough money you can buy a spot in the Sponsored Ads.

However, PPC cannot buy you authority. People who know those are sponsored ads know that you paid to be placed there and that it has nothing to do with the quality of your site. Sometimes that may not matter. It depends whose attention you’re trying to attract.

Ranking for Olympic related terms is, as you can imagine, challenging. When we wrote our first Olympics blog– 2006TurinOlympics.com, it ranked in the top three for the phrase 2006 Turin Olympics. Not only did this lead to a huge amount of traffic, over 200,000 page impressions for the month of February in 2006, but it also lead to being quoted in the Washington Post.

Of course, then we had the domain working for us. But after the Turin Olympics, we decided to create the ongoing winter and summer Olympics blogs. That meant we would no longer be attempting to rank for a specific Olympics, but for the more general (and, therefore, more difficult) terms winter Olympics and summer Olympics. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, we ran into a problem with our ranking. While we ranked well early on, our site completely disappeared the day of the Opening Ceremony and didn’t reappear for over half of the Olympics.

We were concerned we were going to have the same result with this winter’s Olympic blog. Sure enough, when we started out, our rankings were pretty low and so was our traffic. Once we started adding content, though, we were able to rise to 12th in the rankings for “winter Olympics” and to maintain a number 1 ranking for “winter Olympics news”– not bad considering five of the top ten positions were held by the official IOC site, the official Vancouver site, and NBC’s Olympics site. As our rankings rose, so did our traffic. And, apparently, so did our profile and authority in the eyes of others.

During the second week of the Olympics, we were contacted by a representative of the public relations firm running Proctor and Gamble’s Olympics campaign. Would we be interested in interviewing a couple of the women from the U.S. women’s hockey team? Um, sure. That resulted in this post about Jenny Potter.

When Sherry (my co-writer for the blog) emailed our contact to say thanks, she offered to set up another interview. That resulted in this interview with Kristy Yamaguchi. Not bad for a couple of “amateurs” writing an Olympics blog.

So, what’s my point? I know that the pr firm rep found us through the search engines. She didn’t pick a random company who was paying for sponsored links. She picked a website that ranked well for the terms she was searching. Our ranking gave us automatic authority in the eyes of others. In turn, that gave us the opportunity to conduct a couple of interviews that allowed us to create some unique content that will allow us to gain even more traffic. I hope you can see how this could be a good thing for your business.

Even if you’re not trying to conduct interviews or writing a blog on your website (although if you’re not, we really must talk), a top ranking for your keywords WILL promote you as an expert. If you’re searching for Houston widgets, which company are you going to do business with? The one ranked number one or even number four? Or the one ranked twentieth? Whether you, personally, think your ranking should make a difference in your potential customers’ eyes, it does.

Am I saying Pay Per Click is bad and that no one should go that route? Certainly not! More traffic is more traffic and a well-designed PPC campaign can be especially helpful as you’re building your organic search ranking or if you’re in a really competitive niche. But PPC will not help demonstrate that you’re an expert. Natural search results just might.