When starting with SEO one of the top goals for businesses is to rank first on the search results.

It is the equivalent of success and lots of SEO professionals have been working hard to deliver a good ranking to their clients. As SEO is changing though, is it still relevant to aim for a #1 ranking on SERPs?

And if it’s not a priority anymore, what should you do instead?

Defining success in SEO

Every company would like to show up as the first result in a search engine. And it’s not just for the sake of vanity, as the top ranking increases your chances of improved awareness, traffic, authority.

There are more than 40,000 search queries processed[1] by Google every second, which means that there are more than 3.5 billion searches every single day.

We were reporting back in 2013[2] how the top listing in Google’s top position receives 33% of the total traffic. The second position received 17.6% of the traffic, while the fifth result only received 6.1% of the traffic.

This meant that back in the day, the initial goal was to show up on the first page of SERPs and then to work harder to reach the top. It’s not always easy to achieve it and the authority of your site certainly plays a big role, but it was still considered the ultimate goal.

SEO has evolved quite a lot since 2013, which means that even the definition of a successful SEO strategy has changed. It’s not enough anymore to aim for a top ranking. At least, not in the organic search results.

How SEO is changing

The big difference with

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