Top Rankings = Firm Credibility
Your firm’s Google ranking is much more than a tool to gain more traffic. In fact, I think it is impossible to separate a company’s advertising strategy from it’s credibility. To test my hypothesis I recently completed a small survey of fifty people ages eighteen to thirty designed to determine whether fairly savvy internet users link a company’s search ranking with its credibility.
Survey says - Majority of 18 to 30 year olds feel top natural ranking sites have more credibility than their lower ranked competitors -
The survey had only one question:
When using the Internet for business information research purposes do you feel a website’s natural search rank is a significant measure of the company’s overall credibility?
a. Strongly disagree
b. Somewhat disagree
c. Somewhat agree
d. Strongly agree
The answers:
Response “a.” received 3 votes
Response “b” received 11 votes
Response “c” received 16 votes
Response “d” received received 20 votes
Please save your objections… I know that many of you, with even a limited statistics background, are going to find a dozen things wrong with this survey. I understand the surveys weaknesses (i.e. too few participants, too short of a survey, not a random sample of the population, the list goes on…) Notwithstanding the objections, I think the results are somewhat indicative of a larger phenomenon - the generation of search savvy Internet users expect that strong companies will have strong search engine results. In other words, there is an expectation that as of 2008 good companies and law firms should have figured out ways to rank near the top of search engines.
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