3 Numbers Every Entrepreneur Should Know

A lot of business owners hear the words SEO and their eyes glaze over. They wonder what SEO can really do for them, and if all the effort of creating a digital marketing plan anchored by SEO is worth it. Make no mistake, SEO and content marketing are vital in today's world. 

A good SEO campaign can put your website in front of a lot of eyeballs. Here are three numbers that might amaze you if you are thinking of starting a business.

42% 
The website that appears first on Google's search engine results page (SERP) usually gets about 42% of the traffic.

25% 
The website that appears second on Google's SERP gets 25% of the traffic.

10% 
The website that appears third on Google's SERP gets about 10% of the traffic for that search.

And the numbers, of course, only go down from there. So ranking on  the top spot for a certain keyword can bring a lot of traffic to your website. The book How To Make A Website or blog presents this thought experiment:

The exact search item "shoes" is searched for roughly 1,160,000 times per month. If Nike is at rank #1 in Google and getting 42% of that traffic, that is going to translate into almost 500,000 visitors to the Nike website that are interested in the word "shoes". That is going to translate into A LOT of sales.

Now the keywords your business is targeting probably gets less traffic than the keyword shoes. However, they are less competitive and you can rank higher for them. Ranking first and getting 42% of searchers to your website, even for a relatively obscure keyword, can mean a lot of sales.

Apply to the Handshakin Startup Pre-accelerator if you would like to learn some of the free strategies we've used to grow our startup with SEO.