Its a well known statistic that around 90% of clicks happen at the first page of Google (more for some keywords) and that around 3%-4% happen on page 2.

What that means is that by moving from page 2 to page 1, in broad terms, you will increase your visits twenty fold! – and in some cases much more particularly if you can get into the top 5 positions.

I’ve also noticed there are an awful lot of websites on page 2 which just shouldnt be there. They should be on page 1. I’ll give you an example in a moment but the point I want to make is that if you are on page 2 for some of your important keyphrases, it may be that you have to do very little to get elevated to the first page. There are some factors to look at below to help you assess this but first an example.

Do a Google search for ‘ground source heat pumps’ (incidentally – if you go to ‘Google Trends’ you’ll see this term has been rapidly growing in importance over the last 12 months). You’ll see that www.gshp.org.uk – The Ground Source Heat Pumps Association – is languishing half way down page 2 (surely they cant want to be there given that their sole reason for being is to inform people about heat pumps!).

What they have got going for them is lots of inbound links (177), represented by a Google Page Rank of 5 and their domain is around 4 years old. Basically all the essentials to get a good ranking. We used to say if you have a PR 4 some basic on-page SEO is all you need to get a top 3 ranking. Its not quite as simple as that nowadays but you would certainly expect to quite easily move this site to page 1 with some basic on-page SEO. In fact that’s all they need to do – get properly structured tags (they dont even have a meta description and keyword tag!), get a few more paragraphs of text with a few more repetitions of the keyphrase in question. Possibly a few anchor text based links from some other of their pages and that should be it. It’ll certainly be enough to get them to page 1 and possibly in the top 5. Two hours work at most.

So the important factors, if this is something which you are affected by:-

1. Check you backlinks and Page Rank – If you have a PR 3 or above then, generally this is enough to get on to page 1 If…..
2. You domain is at least two years old, and….
3. you have at least 250 words of text on your ranked page.

If you satisfy these 3 points it should be just a matter of tweaking your meta tags (see Lesson 6 and Lesson 7) adding a paragraph or two of text and repeating the keyphrase a few times. Possible adding a few anchor text based links from other pages.

Obviously each case is different and so much depends on the degree of competition, but in 9 times out of 10 cases this is all we have to do for our clients.