The fold is dead - why chase No 1 ?

[Whitey]

There's been plenty of reports about the fold being dead [google.com....] and i'm hearing from marketing folks and webmasters that a lot more traffic is being driven from deeper SERP positions.

Perhaps the reason is that a more mature audience uses the scroll bar , trophy terms are much less effective with Google instant.

Then, by posting Place Search and often less effective local listing results to the top this can only drive users deeper to find more appropriate options. Users won't go away - the 86% of users or so will still persist with Google.

So why worry about chasing No1 - users will find you.

Do these statements reflect your experience or do you see it differently?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You can chase #13 if you like, that would suit me just fine :-)

It's human nature to want to rank as highly as possible, even if that's not worth as much on Google these days.

[Lexur]

It's a valuable point of view if you have a site with good (or very much) content.
I, sincerely, don't care any more about Google. I just build (tons of) content for my users and, yes, they find me.

[BenFox]

On the same term we make in a day at #1 what it takes us a week to make at #10. I know where I'd rather be.

[goodroi]

we can debate if the fold is important or not important. since no one can control their specific ranking position, i think it is smarter to simply build as strong a website as possible. i see no profit in purposely building a weaker website.

[piatkow]

I have seen hits that have come from page 50 in the past but the majority are on searches that get to page one.

Before G started dumping loads of **** at the top of the SERPS I used to suspect that the visitor's eye went naturally to number 2 or 3 rather than number 1 based on which arguements brought the most visits.

I normally concentrate on building a good site but I do keep an eye on what puts other sites above mine in the SERPs and have made a couple of minor tweaks to add specific keywords or phrases to text.

[aspdaddy]

If #position in Google is metric I would change your SEO company/advisor ASAP

[almighty monkey]

#1 still gets over 50% of traffic on a search, compaired to about 2% for rank 10.

Yeah. It's still worth having.

[internetheaven]

You can chase #13 if you like, that would suit me just fine :-)

I agree with (what I think is) your sentiment. ;)

This is a non-discussion that people seem to put out there for SEOs to feel better about themselves and to keep their bosses off their backs for a little while longer. No-one should seek lower positions.

People are scrolling down more because Google's algorithm is getting worse. I take the news that Bing/Yahoo's search market share is increasing + the fact that Google users seem to be scrolling down more and make the assumption that Google results are just bad - not that I should be targetting lower rankings.

[khenninger]

Yep,

Even if traffic might not be as high for a #1 position, its certainly better than a #10.

[freejung]

No-one should seek lower positions.

Agreed, but the question is, do you deliberately target higher-traffic terms that you know you will rank lower on, or low traffic terms where you know you will rank high?

That's going to be highly niche-specific, and it's worth looking at traffic stats to determine the optimal balance of keyword traffic and ranking potential.

[tedster]

Why chase No. 1? Jakob Nielson has a name for it:

many users are at the search engine's mercy and mainly click the top links — a behavior we might call Google Gullibility. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don't know how to do better.

[useit.com...]

The entire article is a solid read on many related topics.