It's not about ranking in position 1… Well, it's not only about ranking in position 1. Like all things that are driven by technology, SEO is constantly changing and has reached a tipping point where to compete you need to own more real estate on the SERPs. This means moving past the vanity of having your website URL's ranking for your priority keywords, and instead accepting that Google ranks different types of content for different types of keywords — and the current type of content on your website may not be able to rank for the terms you're targeting.

This is quite literally what RankBrain is all about.

The practical application is that you may have to accept that to get traffic for the keywords you want — you need to be present on websites that aren't yours.

We see this most often in software verticals where SERPs are comprised of a mix of providers, reviews, and directories, like the SERP for "crm software." If you look at that SERP, take note of a few important elements:

The last point is the most important one.

This SERP has 10 organic results that are NOT actual providers of CRM software — instead they're review sites like Finances Online, Capterra, Webopedia, and Software Advice — or they're publishers like PC Mag, Business News Daily, Forbes, or HBR.

Then if you take note of the 2 software brands that ARE actually ranking: they're Salesforce and Zoho — so in short, you have no chance of ranking your brand's website on this SERP.

However, HubSpot still sees a fair bit of traffic (and conversions) from this SERP. HubSpot is the highest ranked organic provider on this SERP (assuming you consider native English speakers scan left to right then top to bottom), likely sending them a steady amount of new leads.

It's not enough to rank your product or feature page somewhere on page one, diluted among a mix of results from directories, YouTube results, and review blogs. Instead, you need to own the opinions and awareness of every bit of that SERP — and here's where the SERP Monopoly Strategy comes into play.

Identifying Your Highest Value SERPs

Before we get into how to monopolize your target SERPs, the first step is to identify where your efforts should be directed to ensure you're not investing in the wrong keywords.

If you haven't built out a comprehensive keyword matrix to determine this, there's a shortcut you can take using the commercial value of your priority terms.

The cheat code here is to simply take your priority list of terms and multiply their average monthly search volume by their average cost per click. Or, if you're a lazy marketer, you can use a tool like KeywordKeg which will do this for you.

The goal here is to identify the terms where it would be most expensive for you to have to buy traffic versus rank organically and acquire that sustainable traffic for free, month after month.

Looking at the data, you can see that "crm software for sale" is the second most valuable commercial keyword that you would want to be monopolizing after "crm software." Another big consideration is that "crm software," while it's the 800 pound gorilla, might just be too expensive to go after due to the level of difficulty — and instead it may make more sense to consider going after some of the "cheap" modifier keywords (even if you don't sell "cheap software" and you don't want your product associated with being cheap).

This just requires a bit of creativity on how to create assets to grab rankings in those SERPs, remembering they don't necessarily need to be assets that carry your brand.

Let's Look at a Local Professional Services SERP

Consider a local term like "seo services philadelphia" (scrolled past the 4-pack of AdWords ads, and the map pack with 3 results). The pattern holds — a mix of directories, review sites, and aggregators dominate, with only a handful of actual service providers breaking through.

The lesson: you need to be present on the sites that dominate these SERPs. Guest posts, directory listings, review placements, case study features — these are all forms of SERP real estate you can own.

Or an Ecommerce Investigation SERP

Starting to see where this is heading? The main goal is to build a list of commercially focused terms so you can off-set your cost of traffic acquisition via SEO. Once you've gotten your priorities identified and confirmed, it's time to dial in your strategy to own as much of the boardwalk as possible.

Share of Pixels

The sheer amount of physical real estate you're able to occupy on the SERP has become the equivalent of owning Boardwalk and Park Place on the Parker Bros. game board.

Each ranking position on the SERP accounts for an approximate total percentage of total clicks. Here's the breakdown based on a running study by AWR:

Desktop click-through rates by position:

Mobile click-through rates by position:

And featured snippets pull in approximately 8.6% of clicks according to Ahrefs.

This means that the gains to be had are exponential in nature for every additional ranking you're able to own on the first page.

Backing into Traffic

If you have 2 rankings on a desktop SERP, regardless of position, you're looking at an average net click-through rate of 14.48%. If you have 3, it's 21.72%. 4 is 28.96%, and 5 is 36.2% (based on a gross average of ~7.24% for being on "page 1"). This is just a rough baseline — the actual click-through percentages will likely be much higher depending on which positions those rankings are.

When you start backing into revenue realization based on these increased traffic share percentages, the numbers become staggering.

Imagine a scenario where your site converts 3% of gross traffic to a lead, then you convert 34% of leads into sales, and your average sale is $100. This means every visit to your website is worth $0.98:

100 visits = 3.4 leads = 1 sale × $100 = $100 gross (gross conversion rate = 1%)

Now assume your current SEO traffic is based on ranking #1 (and only #1) for a keyword with 1,000 searches per month. Your average CTR for position #1 is ~22%, meaning you receive 220 visits/month, creating 2 sales worth $200.

If you were to increase your total share of real estate on that one SERP, based on an average aggregate of ~7.24% CTR per additional ranking, here's how it breaks down into revenue: every additional ranking equals an additional sale each month from the same SERP.

You need to understand that this is at the individual keyword level, so this potential exponential return is for every keyword you dial in, and it continues to pay returns month over month, month after month.

Based on the model above, you're ranking 5 URLs on SERP 1 for a keyword with an average of 1,000 searches per month, netting you $500 in revenue per month.

If you expand this and say you're able to do this for 300 keywords (where you eat up 5 rankings anywhere on page 1) for a total monthly search volume of around 85,000 searches/month, this revenue number is closer to $85,000 — and that's with just a 1% gross conversion rate.

Compare this to only having the #1 ranking on those same SERPs: instead of ~42,000 visits/month, you'd only bring in 18,700 visits, equaling only ~$18,000 in total revenue.

How to Take Advantage

The best way to take advantage of this is to:

The brands winning in organic search aren't the ones with the best single page — they're the ones with the broadest footprint. Stop optimizing for position 1 on one URL. Start optimizing for dominance across the entire SERP.