Ben Roy

I've been working on getting one of my sites to rank for a pretty competitive keyword (around 1,000,000 results for the quoted term). I've been parked about the 8th or 9th page for a long time, and just finally decided I was going to get serious about a week ago.

Over the weekend I suddenly jumped up to the 4th page, and finally today to the 3rd page. Driving home, I was thinking that while I was happy to have moved up so far, it was rather inconsequential. Why? Because the number of clicks I'm likely to get in the 35th slot is about the same as I'd get in the 85th slot: none. So yes I'm making progress and getting closer to a meaningful position, but in the meantime there's not a significant benefit to me.

So where does poker come into play? If you've ever looked at the structure of medium or large tournaments (100s or 1000s of entrants), there's a common theme. The payouts increase dramatically the closer you get to the top. Even with 500 entrants, a tournament may pay 30% of the pot to the first place finisher.

For poker players that means the best strategy is to shoot for the top spots. Many players get focused on just getting paid, no matter the ending position. As they start getting close to the lowest paid slot, they play scared because they don't want to get knocked out and receive nothing. The better players understand that it's better to get knocked out many times and cash once in a very high position rather than getting paid small amounts frequently.

Ranking for search results is the same way. The vast majority of the click throughs for any given term go to the top few results. In many cases, the #1 result receives 40% of the clicks. Every position that you rank lower than #1, your traffic will drop off in a major way. By the time you fall off the first page of results, you'll usually get almost no traffic at all.

It's worth putting in the effort to move up any amount you can once you get close. Going from 79 to 78 is no big deal and hardly worth messing with. On the other hand you should poor every possible effort into moving from the 4th position up to 3rd, or even more so from 2nd to 1st. And you're definitely better off concentrating on a single keyword keyword and pushing yourself to the top than spreading your focus on getting a mediocre ranking for a wide range of terms.