inbound-marketing

58Inbound Marketingthat 75 percent of searchers click the organic listings while25 percent click on the paid results. 2 This means you’ll likelyget much more traffic if you can rank for certain keywordsorganically than if you were to try to buy your way into thepaid results for those same words.Clearly, you’d prefer to get free traffic instead of payingfor it. That’s what search engine optimization (SEO) is allabout. You want to increase the chances your Web pageswill show up as high as possible in the Google results whena user searches for a keyword related to your business.By default, when users type a search term into Google,10 results or listings are shown per page. This means thefirst page of results shows the top 10 results, the secondpage shows the next 10 results, and so on. It’s important tonote that getting on the first page of Google is very important,because the first page gets a lion’s share of the trafficfor that keyword. A recent study shows that Google’s firstpage captures over 89 percent of the traffic, and most userswill not look beyond the first page. Even within the firstpage, the traffic is not spread evenly—the top-ranked result(number one on the first page) captures about 42 percent ofthe traffic. The higher you rank for a given term, the morevisitors to your web site, and the difference between thenumber of visitors does not occur in small increments—it’ssignificant. So, you want to do your best to rank as high aspossible for the keyword that you care about.The practice of understanding how search engineswork, and striving to get a web site to rank well for keywords,is known as search engine optimization (SEO). The2 Organic versus paid search; http://www.hubspot.com/organic-vspaid-search/;http://www.enquiroresearch.com/eyetracking-report.aspx