Don’t use Search Engine Ranking to Track SEO Success
Are you using Search Engine Ranking as a Key Indicator?
There are a number of reasons for saying this but to simplify the reasons why, search engine rankings are variable from minute to minute never mind day to day.
The main thing to get your head around is to ask yourself why you are interested in your search engine ranking?
Usually when you ask people why they are so interested in their ranking, they say something along these lines: “I’m interested in my search engine ranking because it indicates how many people are likely to click through to my website.”
Search Engine Ranking is BUNK!
Search Engine Ranking is Bunk!
Why? Well because it’s easy to rank a site high in a search engine you have optimised your page to rank for a keyword phrase that nobody is interested in. Obviously, if you do this all of the effort you are putting into SEO Optimisation are a complete waste of time.
So, do you still think Search Engine Ranking is a Key Indicator to the success of your SEO?
You do!!! OK… What we should all be looking to do is bring highly targeted traffic to our website. I’m sure we all agree with that statement. Your search engine ranking does not necessarily indicate that any resultant clicks are bringing targeted traffic to your site.
So, if you have optimised your pages for useless unrelated keyword phrases that nobody is interested in, you should not be using them as an indicator of SEO Success.
Similarly, if you optimised your page for very high ranking keyword phrases and they don’t convert to sales, then these are similarly usesless…
What’s worse there are other variables that effect your search engine ranking. Have you ever checked your ranking and then checked again moments later to find your ranking has gone up or down?
I know I have! Rankings fluctuate all the time and can change considerably over a few minutes. Search results are sometimes geotargeted. You see the search engines are clever beasts and they know where you are in the world by your IP Address and if they see fit, they can present your with pages that are close to the location that you are searching from. The basic reason for this is that they believe they are more relevant to you.
Another thing that can affect your ranking can be the use of ‘Personalised Search’. Try this test if you have a Google or Yahoo account. Log into your account and issue a search using a specific keyword phrase and check the results. Then log out of your Google or Yahoo account and repeat the search. Chances are that you will have a completely different set of results. Why? Because when you log into your Google or Yahoo account, the search engine knows that much more about you and uses this information in an attempt to make their search results even more relevant to you.
Personalised Search basically means that nobody on the planet will necessarily get the same set of results for the same search term.
I’m hoping that you are agreeing with me that Search Engine Ranking is a pretty useless way of measuring SEO success.
What should we be measuring? In my next article on this subject I will explore a better way of measuring SEO Success.
Please let me know how you are measuring SEO Success by posting below. If you would like to contact me about this subject, please feel free to do so by using the contact form or on Facebook or Twitter
Other Articles in this series:
Don’t use Search Engine Ranking to Track SEO Success
How to use Google Analytics to Track SEO Success
Conversion is the best indicator of SEO Success
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