Since search engine optimization continues to drive down costs for our clients, we work hard to get them ranked well. When you’re trying to rank on a few words, it’s pretty simple to see if you’re doing the right things… using a tool like Authority Labs, you can monitor day to day ranking. We do this for all of our clients.
However, for some of our clients that have a significant number of keywords that they are ranking on, we’ll pull reports from a tool like Semrush to identify all the keywords they are ranking on and then review their distribution.
It’s pretty common for a superior site to rank very high on most keywords and then trail off. Poor sites rank in a bell curve as you see above, with the majority no where near page one. Don’t believe the hype from SEO guys that talk about page 1 ranking… you have to get into those top slots on page 1 if you really want traffic.
As we work with clients, we continue to monitor their keyword rank distribution to ensure that the curve is moving from right to left – and not from left to right. For some of our clients with large content distribution networks, we’re seeing that curve move in the wrong direction. That means that the aggregate ranking for the site is continuing to drop. We’ll talk about what can be done to reverse that in an upcoming post – I just wanted to introduce folks to this distribution.
I find it fascinating that sites are often ranked in groups like this and don’t have haphazard distribution all over the place. We’ve done this analysis for a number of large clients and there always seems to be a similar grouping. I suppose it’s not a surprise to some who understand the Google Pagerank algorithm.
