Visibility (Branding)

Most consumers assume that top placement in the search engines is like a stamp of approval on a business. Surely a company could not rank highly in the search results if it were not one of the best in its field, right?

If you are an experienced search engine user, you probably recognize that the preceding statement is not true. However, the fact is that many consumers, and even business searchers, interpret high search rankings as an implicit endorsement.

Therefore, for critical brand terms, the SEO practitioner should work toward improving the search engine rankings for the website he is working on. There is a subtlety here, though. Few businesses will need help for ranking on their company name; that is, if your company name is Acme Widget Co., you will most likely rank #1 for that search term even with little SEO effort. There are a few reasons for this, one of the most important being that many of the inbound links to your site will use your company name as the anchor text, and very few links will be given to other websites using your company name as the anchor text.