Should a no.1 ranking be your main SEO goal?
The right people in place. A number one search ranking doesn’t hold the value that it used to.
On the most basic level, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a battle for visibility. Companies compete for the highest rankings so they can grab the attention of search engine users. When users visit their website, they will hopefully gain new business. (We’ll cover the importance of having a website which effectively converts those visitors into leads in a future blog post!)
However, a new era of SEO might be challenging these assumptions. Is the first spot on a search engine results page still the most important aim? And will that coveted no. 1 spot help your business turn visitors into customers?
Keyword optimisation no longer has the biggest impact on SEO success. In the past, if you could find keywords with high traffic and low competition, your could rely on remaining at the top of a search. Keywords still matter, but how they matter has changed.
Thanks to semantic search, the relationship between keywords, phrases, and search rankings is now less clear. Google tries to match queries with the most relevant content – not necessarily the closest text match. This means that marketers need to think about how the keywords they want to rank for are used by potential patients, both in type and as spoken queries.
Good content is more important than ever. Google’s semantic search algorithm now focuses on the quality of your content as well as keywords. This development may make things seem more complicated, but in fact, it makes things easier for marketers in many ways.
Explainer: the word “semantic” refers to the meaning or essence of something. “Semantic search” aims to not only find keywords, but to determine the intent and contextual meaning of those keywords.
Think about how you can produce quality content about your products or services and encourage other websites to link to that content. High quality links into your website increase your authority, while a large amount of high quality content aligns well with semantic search.
By creating excellent content, you’ll find that you naturally rank for lots of relevant keywords and phrases, without necessarily having to specifically target them.
Ranking first for a given search term is a great way to make potential patients aware of your clinic, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll click through to your site. Of course it’s correct that a higher ranking can lead to a higher click-through rate (CTR), but you need to think about more than that to gain a significant increase in clicks.
Optimise your website to ensure that your business is the most attractive listing on a search results page. Make sure that your page titles and descriptions are appealing and that you control how your snippets appear in a search listing.
Don’t be fooled by the numbers and remember that not all traffic is of equal quality. If you increase your traffic through search rankings, but your bounce rate increases to an unacceptable level, you’ve achieved very little.
Explainer: “bounce rate” is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a web page without taking any action, such as clicking on a link to another page or filling out a form.
In summary, you need to consider more than just trying to achieve a no. 1 ranking. You must also optimise your website for lead conversions, maintain consistent branding across platforms, and prioritise the experience of your user. This will help you level the scales to a better balance between visitor quality and quantity.
As always, no single strategy will guarantee success, but taking a holistic view of your website with strong focus on visitor experience will always take you in the right direction.


