Guaranteed Top Ten Listings at Google!

You’ve seen these companies, you’ve seen the ads.  “Guaranteed Top Ten Listings at Google!”.  They prey on the fact that you, as a consumer, don’t understand the difference between a paid listing, a local listing and a top 10 organic listing.

The purpose of SEO is to get your site listed in the top ten search results without having to pay to be there and without it being a local listing (although this is important) for keywords that will get you targeted visitors who are likely to spend money at your store or sign up for your newsletter, whatever you want the goal of your website to be.

But, the average website owner usually doesn’t know the difference between all of these different listings.  So let’s talk about them so that YOU are an educated consumer.

First, the Paid Listings (PPC)

In case you’re not familiar, when you do a search at Google and get a page of results, oftentimes you’ll see listings at the very top of the page which are highlighted in yellow (at Google) and you’ll see listings down the right hand side of the page.

These listings (outlined in red above) while technically on the first page of Google, pay to be listed here.  Each time someone clicks on any one of these ads, the owner of the ad has to pay a certain amount of money.  The more competitive the term, the more money you’ll have to spend per click.  Now to be fair, there are lots of little nuances that go into a PPC listing such as (as previously mentioned) how competitive a term is but other factors are how much you’re willing to pay for each click as well as how much you’re willing to budget each month for those ads to run.  So while you could split hairs and say “Well, this is a top-ten listing.” you would be right.  But, in SEO it’s our goal to get you listed in top spots without having to pay to be listed there.

SEM which stands for “search engine marketing” is a way to not only get your site listed in the top ten results at Google but also helps you place ads in the Pay Per Click marketplace so that you can get traffic to your site while you wait for the search engines to pick up and start ranking your web pages.  Now I can’t speak for all SEMs but typically across the board you’ll find that no legitimate SEO company will count this as a “top ten listing” at Google; again, because you have to pay to be listed there.

Second, the Local Listings

I’ll be the first to admit that if you have a local business whether that be in your home or an actual walk-in brick-and-mortar business, a local listing is an absolute MUST.  Google has made quite a few updates to their local listings so that you now can show up for highly competitive terms whereas before you had to state a location in your search query.  These are what local listings look like in the search results:

However, again, when we talk about a top ten listing in a search results page, we’re talking about the listings that A) you don’t have to pay for and B) the listings that aren’t local.  One flaw to a local listing is that if you’re in an area that doesn’t have a lot of competing local businesses listed in the local business area, you’re listing will not show up as a local business.  Plus, a local business listing doesn’t take into account all of the different keywords you’d want to rank well for in a search results page.

Here’s a great example I did on a search for “bicycle tires”.  Now, in my local area there are tons of bicycle shops and most if not all of them sell bicycle tires.  However notice from the screenshot below that there are no local listings like the image above shown:

Now this means that even though you have a local business that does sell bicycle tires, the local business listing doesn’t show for that topic.  To be fair, this could be due to a variety of reasons; either local business shops in my area have not created a local business listing, or if they have they have not listed bicycle tires as one of their items, or, likely, there’s just not enough local businesses to warrant a Google local listing.

This is why actual top 10 natural listings are so important…

Third, Top Ten Natural or Organic Listings

This is the cream of the crop.  This is what SEO actually does for you is get you listed in the top ten positions of a SERP (search engine results page) without having to pay for it and without worrying whether or not your local listing is going to show up at all.  If you look at the image above, and you sold bicycle tires, it is the goal of SEO to get your site listed right there in the top positions where those other sites currently reside.

Can you guarantee those listings?  Absolutely not!  How come?  Because we, as SEOs don’t control the search engines.  We aren’t privvy to all of the factors that go into a top listing at Google or any other major search engine for that matter.  We do however, understand quite a few of the factors that can make that happen.

Things such as what keywords you’re using on the page, how your website is set up (is it easy for the search engines to move through or does it stop them in their tracks?), who is linking to you, how important those links are, and tons of other little details.

So the bottom line is, the next time someone promises you “Guaranteed Top Ten Listings at Google!” read carefully because you might be in for more than you bargained for.

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