Difference between First and Second page Google rankings (with examples!)

Most local contractors ask me the same thing: Why do I need to be on the first page of Google, I’m already out there? Or I already am on the first page, I just checked it.

Before we start, I have to explain one thing. Google shows personalized Search results.
Google Personalized Search is a feature of Google Search. All searches on Google Search are associated with a browser cookie record. When you search something in Google, the search results are not only based on the relevance of each web page to the search term, but also on which websites you (or someone else using the same browser) visited through previous search results.
Basically, this means if you visited your website a couple of times before and now you type in roofing + your city, Google will show your website on the top. That doesn’t mean other people will see your website.
To get accurate results you need to use tracking tools or clear your browser search history (and cookie), go into incognito mode and then check.

Now let’s talk about those famous Google first page rankings. There is a huge difference in ranking in top 3 positions on Google or on the second or third (or any other page) of Google. The second or twentieth page, it’s really the same. You can check it more in detail in my previous post.
Luckily there are a couple of tools that can help us check organic/Google traffic. The most popular ones are SemRush and Ahrefs. Unfortunately, they can’t show the exact metrics as they are privately owned tools that crawl Google for results. To see full traffic reports of a particular website we need to check their Google Analytics reports. They also don’t show low search long tail keywords.

But they can give us

• An overview of a website monthly traffic
• Are they spending any money on Google ads
• How many backlinks they have etc.
• How many social share activity they have

1. Example – first-page ranking roofing contractor in Houston

Company that is dominating Houston area is: mmroofsidinghouston.com
In the top left corner, you can see that they:

• Are ranking for – 672 keywords
• Have monthly Traffic of – 675 people
• They would need to pay $8000 to Google Adwords to get the same amount of traffic

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2. Example – second and third page rankings for roofing contractor in Houston keywords

I found this company www.rooftectx.com on the bottom of page two for a keyword: „ Roofing Contractor Houston.“

In the top left corner, you can see that they:

• Are ranking for – 75 keywords
• Have monthly Traffic of – 6 people
• They would need to pay $97 to Google Adwords to get the same amount of traffic

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Hopefully, the whole Google/SEO game is much clearer now. You can see that MM roofing with almost 700 monthly traffic is dominating. If we use 20% conversion rate that transforms to 140 leads every month. That’s just from Google search. Google maps rankings are not shown here.

If you want to see your website statistics or your biggest competitors statistic using the same tools, please feel free to drop them in the comment section or contact us.

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