Natural search engine rankings (sometimes called organic rankings) are the listings on the left hand side of the results generated by the world’s major search engines, Google, Yahoo7.com.au and nineMSN.
Not surprisingly, every website owner would like to be listed on the top of the search engine rankings as the number 1 listing receives the highest percentage of traffic. The most popular search engine in Australia is Google with a market share of over 80%.

High rankings in Google is the goal of most website owners so the competition can be fierce, particularly for competitive keywords such as “home loans” where the transaction value is high and the number of searchers per month is also “high”. The greater the competition the harder it will be for your website to achieve high search engine rankings.
What is a high search engine ranking?

The generally accepted benchmark for high search engine rankings is having your website featured in the Top 10 results. If you website is not listed in the Top 10 results you are missing out on the action. Very few Internet users looked beyond the first page of web search results. Internet users will generally perform another web search if they do not find what they are looking for in their initial keyword search.

Top 10 search engine rankings in Google can be extremely valuable for your business and will help increase the number of unique visitors to your website. Once your website is featured in the Top 10 ranking results, every ranking position improvement will provide more traffic to your website.

If your site can achieve Top 5 search engine rankings your website will generally feature in the search results above the fold, what this means is the Internet user will be able to see your website without scrolling down to see those websites ranked between positions 6-10. The amount of traffic your website will receive from search engines will increase substantially once you achieve Top 5 ranking results.
To summarise:

A) First goal: to achieve number 1 search engine rankings for your ‘business name”
B) Second goal: to achieve Top 10 natural rankings for your targeted key phrases
C) Third goal: to achieve Top 5 natural rankings for your targeted key phrases