...be everywhere you need to be
Search engine rankings were quite the rage some 10 odd years ago but SEO matured as a profession, as did the learnings and the KPIs (not to mention search engine technology). I have seen countless #1 rankings for highly competitive search spaces that didn’t make any money. I’ve also seen plenty that did. It isn’t the ranking alone that produced a negative or positive result, but rather a whole hoard of other variables that come into play from usability to design to the products/services on offer and their prices.
A recent conversation on the topic covers a lot of the main points in this argument. It was triggered by Pete Young’s post on the topic “Are rankings a reliable metric for SEO success?“. I urge you to read both to get a more in-depth idea of why so many of us saying this. Some of the main reasons that come up are:
- Personalised search
- It’s a false target
- It doesn’t guarantee success (revenue)
- Geolocation
I think that Nick Wilsdon does a great job of explaining it by saying:
“To take a real-world example, an education system might set itself the target of passing X% of students in their exams. To meet this target, schools ensure they teach students past exam papers and technique 24/7. This results in the children become good at exams but receiving a less rounded & in-depth education. Their knowledge is limited strictly to the questions set by the exam board, which they learn to answer parrot-fashion.”
Having said all that, I do believe that taking a snapshot of how the search engines are receiving your site using a cross section of search terms is good. If your site is down at page 30 for a given keyword phrase, then something is definitely wrong one way or another. It’s time to audit that site and the search space and make some changes both technical and tactical. Appearing on page 1 of search engine results will guarantee you some nice visibility so it is desirable, just it is no longer the only thing to focus on. You can achieve visibility in quite a lot of different places now and also in a lot of different ways, for example:
- Social networks
- Data propagation (Linked Data)
- Mobile apps
- Social bookmarking sites (and the like)
- Maps and directories
- and quite a few more places
The trick is figure out where your demographic is and to be there. Search engines are used by most people so it makes sense to target those and to want to be visible there, however John, Joe and Jenny aren’t going to be seeing the same results all the time due to personalised search engine results. Recommendation systems are powerful and I foresee a lot more of those appearing in interesting places in the future. I don’t think that it’s about getting a site to #1 alone but also making sure that the people who get to that site find value there and love it enough to bookmark it and more importantly to share it.
In order to get be really good at this, you need (amongst other things):
- Digital landscape knowledge
- Information about the people you’re trying to attract (where they go, what they do, what they like…)
- Something worthwhile to offer
- Lots of technical know-how on various platforms
- The willingness to innovate
- Excellent online communication skills (text, images, conversation…)
- An ear to the ground (this is a dynamic beast)
- Many ears and eyes on your visitors/users (observe them and listen to them)
You should be measuring (amongst other things):
- Conversions
- Engagement
- Reach
- Leads
- Ratings (on 3rd party sites)
- Brand advocates
- Sentiment
- ROI (be careful how you define this, it’s not always money)
- Conversations
- Influence
- Links (be careful with this, not all links are equal)
- Have you achieve the goal you set out to achieve in the 1st place?
The rankings story is the same as the Twitter followers story really:
Having hundreds of followers is not necessarily going to make a difference to your business and neither is a #1 ranking in Google. In addition to this rankings fluctuate so it’s even harder to assess your success based just on that one metric.
I hear from some SEO’s who offer ranking reports alone that their clients request it so they have to provide it. I’m all for that, just there’s a whole lot more to provide and overlay with that. In addition it’s hard imho to use rankings as a measure of success alone when they keep shifting.
The field is pretty divided on whether they matter or not. Speaking for myself, I’m more interested in building really successful sites that fulfil my client’s goals and meet users’ needs than getting a #1 ranking. It is sometimes a meaningless trophy (not always). Providing value to users and interest for my client’s products/services comes first.
And remember:
“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business” (Henry Ford)
I totally agree that face value rankings hold very little weight in the SEO world, your post title sums it really well.
I think a big problem is that the SEO industry shot itself in the foot a little bit here, whenever someone outside the field tries to talk to us we emphasise the rankings. Maybe we don’t mean to, maybe it’s just “some” people but there is no denying that most people still don’t know what SEO is and those who do would probably say “it’s to get me top of Google”.
As time has gone by we have realised this is no longer the case but it’s difficult to make client expectations keep in line with industry knowledge. Since they still think they are paying to be top of Google it ends up becoming a necessity to at least report rankings to clients even though you know there are much more important metrics or problems to deal with first.
This ends up presenting a whole host of new problems when you see different positions because a client is signed in or is in a different country etc.
I try very hard to work with clients and help them understand the different metrics behind SEM as a whole but it takes time and not every client (not even every SEO) is actually bothered about hearing this.
Overall I agree with your main point (which I gather to be “rankings are not the king of SEO metrics any more”) but I do have some comments:
“however John, Joe and Jenny aren’t going to be seeing the same results all the time due to personalised search engine results.” – no, but they’ll see the same results most of the time. Personalized Search isn’t remotely as dramatic as previously anticipated.
“In addition to this rankings fluctuate so it’s even harder to assess your success based just on that one metric.” – rankings are fairly stable over relatively short amounts of time (like a week) and rankings are a decent metric to judge SEO success by.
Note that I agree that rankings should not be the only metric. But an SEO consultant that doesn’t offer ranking reports is really missing the point, imho.
But I have the #1 comment here–doesn’t that ensure my SEO success?
Seriously, it would be nice if more people realized that not everything in life is competitive (cf. zero-sum games
), not all competitions are worth winning (cf. winner’s curse
, and not all games are worth playing (cf. WarGames
).
Hey guys, thank you for the comments.
Craig you are right, there is quite an education to provide to clients and many have little idea of what a good measure of success is. Actually I would say that most people don’t realise that rankings change even. It’s part of the job to educate and through this you gain trust and a fantastic working relationship. It’s well worth doing. If you lose clients because they insist on what you don’t consider to be best practise, it’s better for them to go to someone else instead.
Barry personalisation is real and is here, in fact I’ll write something about that next maybe. Here in Australia we tend to get a lot of UK/US results in our local ones in some of our search spaces, and these tend to change from signed-in/out and location too. You can’t choose to benchmark with something that moves like that. In the UK I did a study and checked top 20 rankings for “car insurance” over a few months and they moved a lot. If you say to me that my site was #1 in Google for “wellies” but just for the week of x to y, it pretty much won;t mean anything to me as a business. I need to know how many wellies I’ve sold or how much influence my brand now has as result. I think also that you will be seeing more pronounced personalisation in the future as more and more user data is gathered.
Dan: Amen
Well said…
SEO has matured into an element of marketing strategy. A top 10 ranking has no value if it doesn’t generate revenue.
The challenge is finding the right target audience and focusing your marketing strategy around it – which includes SEO, but also includes sales follow up, (drip) marketing processes, marketing automation and marketing metrics evaluation.
As complex and involved as the specialty of SEO is – it’s really just one integral element of most business marketing plans.
I just finished discussing with my client (a fortune 100 company) about the importance of meeting the company’s goals and objectives and why they are into online marketing right now.
I did not focus on search engine rankings actually but more on the goal conversions aligned with their objectives so that they can intelligibly make good business decisions on the data I presented. They were very happy! I was happy because I put value first before the thoughts of the checks afterwards.
Putting the customer experience ahead of page rank has the benefit of referrals and direct type ins. Provide the best customer experience and everything else will take care of itself.
Thanks for giving this blog about that ranking is not important, too good post and informative.
People are getting more web-savvy by the second and bounce off of time wasting pages faster than you can blink an eye. We are becoming very used to the fact that many top positions are taken by NexTag, Diretories, and data miners. A gaggle of keyword heavy nonsense just makes people feel like they are talking to a politician, there has to b esubstance, the ranking is just the wrapper. The packaging to something gotten for free and easily discarded.