I was listening to a podcast recently where the person claimed to have over 100,000 first page listings on Google. While this might just be his marketing ploy, the problem is, that isn’t how it works. You can’t really determine that, as there are an unlimited number of possibilities when it comes to Google search, and each yields a different result. In fact there are over 1 trillion searches every month!
As Neil Patel says, “75% of people will never scroll past the first page on a Google search, which is why you need to rank on page 1 of Google. You can’t afford to be ranking on the second, third, or fourth page. You just won’t get the clicks and traffic you need to make SEO worth your time and money.”
But, showing up on the first page of Google is nearly impossible if you’re just starting out. The deck is stacked. And it’s not in your favor. To get around this, you need to start by dominating long-tail keywords.
With a long enough keyword, any site will rank on page 1 unless it is under a penalty. But who types 25 words to search? Meaning if they are not “Buy words” you are wasting your time. So you need to see what “Buy words” are being used as keywords to find your site.
Google will give you quite of few of them very, very easily. Here’s how:
Create a Google Search Console Account and Analytics Account so you can view this data.
Once it is installed you can then look at this data quite easily. After you log in, click the “Performance” link located item the left hand column.
You will then see the following information.
Queries – Search terms your pages appeared for.
Impressions – The number of times each of your pages appeared in the serps.
CTR – Click thru rate
Clicks – how many people visited you for each Query
Position – What position your pages appeared at.
You can also determine what devices were used, desktop, tablet, phone. Despite everyone saying that most search occurs via a cell phone, the vast majority of searches for my own website are from a desktop, by a factor of 9 to 1.
Since you have to be logged into Google Search Console for a website you own, I can only show you the results of my website. For example:
This would indicate that I have 1,000 clicks from search results. The largest number of searches that result in people seeing my site (and clicking on it) are for “webstores” and “web stores” (which is to be expected, and why I named my site that).
I’ve written some blog posts about cybersecurity, as well as my book Cyber Wars: The Battle for Your Data. The interesting part to me is that I’m appearing for search results related to breachcomp2.0. Perhaps not many people wrote about that or I just did a really good job optimizing that article for SEO. But it indicates to me that maybe I need to create more content around cyber security.
As you can see from the image, I am also getting traffic related to ecommerce guest posts. I accept guest posts on my blog and people are clearly searching for that opportunity. Content marketing and Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets (another of my books) round out the top 10.
As you click on the right arrow, you can scroll through all of the search terms that have resulted in people seeing your site listed and how many clicks have resulted from those search terms. That is what people are searching for and driving traffic to your site. If the only thing that you are getting seen for is your company name and not for what you offer, then you have your work cut out for you. If people are searching for what you offer and are clicking on your site as a result, you can add even more focus to those keywords. Either way, this is great information, even if it doesn’t specifically answer the question of “how many first page results does my website appear on?”
Greg Jameson has been writing blog articles on ecommerce and internet marketing for over 10 years. Learn more about Greg at https://webstoresltd.com/about/
Guest Posting
