Many times have I been browsing through forums and freelance websites and seen – “Need to be on fist page”, “Will pay $$$ for first page of Google”, “Will sell my soul for page 1 of Google” – maybe not the last one but you get the idea.

I work with over 40 websites including client and personal projects. For some of these sites, obtaining a page 1 positioning is just not possible, well without spending tens of thousands of pounds anyway (which clients are reluctant to do on seo). Reason being the competitiveness for some keywords are just too high, the first page will be populated with international known brands with 12 year old domains and a trillion backlinks.

Obviously for less competitive keywords anything is possible when you put your mind to it. However a question that has been playing on my mind is – do we even need to be on page one of Google?

Well the answer is yes and no. For extremely popular keywords, being as far down as page 3 or page 4 can still provide more than enough traffic to keep 3 holiday villas in the Caribbean ticking over.

Don’t believe me? Well here is a screen shot of one client’s site I work on:

You may not think it’s a great deal of visits but this is one keyword of about 15 returning similar results. In fact the total visit count for the year positioned around page 3-4 was a total of 400K in 2007 just from SE’s. I can’t possibly image what being on the first page would yield for popular keywords but let me get back to my point.

If there are any website owners that have demanded a “page 1” position in the past, be sure that you understand sometimes it’s not needed, and sometimes it is near impossible, lower pages can produce the results you are after.