I return from Chicago's SES conference this week, enlightened after speaking with many online ad decision makers in control of ad budgets.  It seems there was a recurring theme that I heard many times, and I stopped to think about how much it impacts our industry in whole. It's always been a part of it, but I was amazed at how much so.

To quote Ricky Bobby - "If you ain't first, you're last."

It didn't occur to me how much people think this is true in the world of web marketing.  Regardless of organic or PPC, people want to be in the number one position - period.  Teaching people that it really doesn't matter that much can certainly be a challenge.  There is simply going to be a point where you are suffering diminishing returns by trying to take the top spot (in terms of effort or financial cost) and it doesn't make sense to focus on being number 1 when number 2 or 3 isn't really so bad.

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be #1 than #2, and I'd rather be at any of those positions than #50 because this thinking goes out the window if nobody is seeing your link anyway, but web marketers need to really emphasize the importance of having a better "hook" than the competition / other sites on the SERP.  Searchers are getting more experienced all the time and are evolving into a more sophisticated bunch, modifying search queries because of that experience.  People certainly aren't clicking on a link simply because it is in the top spot.  People click on a link in a SERP because the site seems to fit what they are looking for.

Part of what I spoke about at the conference last week was the emphasis on being intelligent, using words and phrases that convert over emphasizing #1 positioning.  I have several sites that come in at the #3 slot for very competitive terms, but when you look at the headline (typically the title tag from the page), my pages address what the visitor of the page is likely searching for and it is more enticing than the sites ranked #1 and #2.  The 3rd slot works very well for me, and the improvement by moving up a spot or two would likely be very small, especially in regard to any potentially futile effort that would be necessary to jump up a position or two. 

Everyone knows the importance of the title tag for SEO purposes, but it is just as important, maybe even more, for clickthrough purposes from the SERPs and should be written for people (while including keywords, of course, for SE's). This is also where the META description can play a large factor, as it often brings an additional hook for a visitor that is trying to decide if visiting your site is worth their precious and valuable time.

This is even more important in terms of PPC (side note - I no longer can call it paid search, as I also learned last week that "paid" implies to many people that there is no cost or investment to organic search success).  I presented a case study on a site I put together detailing my proposal for a college football playoff system.  I started a PPC campaign by paying to own the top spot for the keyword "BCS" and was paying about $.80 per click to maintain that spot.  Considering this was the morning after Pitt beat West Virginia and Oklahoma beat Missouri, there was a lot of searching being done for this phrase.  However, there were only 2 competitors bidding on this term.  So, I lowered my maximum bid to $.05, still assuring I'd be on virtually every search page - albeit not remaining at the top spot. 
After an additional 50,000 impressions, my conversion rate remained EXACTLY the same on the nickel clicks as they did for the more expensive one, presumably because of the creative title and description that was used as a part of the campaign. 

The great thing about PPC is that it can bring traffic, but also easily be used to help you determine what specific titles and descriptions are converting (or at least being clicked through).  This can then be taken to the organic side and implemented in META descriptions / titles (titles only where it makes, sense as titles can greatly impact search rankings).  I found this to be very interesting, and it makes an ad budget go much further.

As 2007 winds down, one prediction I am going to make for 2008 is that there will be a huge emphasis on optimizing content and title/description combinations to improve conversion rates.  Use of Google Website Optimizer and general multi-variate and A/B testing will be a hot topic in the year ahead, and deservedly so.

Because if you ain't first... be second.  And if you ain't second, be third.  But give a better reason to click, or hook, and people will visit your site.