David Mill of MediaCo was shocked that my survey this year left his company missing from the top rankings after such a glowing performance in previous years.

He suggested that my choice of just a single phrase could lead to misleading results - a point he set out to prove by doing his own extended survey of Page 1 positions achieved in Google UK by the same companies as I had cited, plus his own.

He chose to search on the following phrases. The figures on the right are the number of searches on each one shown by UK Overture in the last month.

The number of first page positions achieved by each 'contestant' were then counted. The results are shown below:

Conclusions?

1. Some key phrases are much more important than others
2. Simplistic measures need to be treated with caution
3. Yes! MediaCo are certainly one of the top companies.

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