Whether you’re handling your own SEO, working with a reliable SEO company, or just hoping it’ll somehow happen on its own, you probably like to measure your SEO performance.
Which is why so many of us monitor rankings for our keywords. The higher the better – more so when we’re above our competition, right?
Rankings, however, in spite of how much we love them, are becoming flawed to the point of irrelevance.
Location.
Carry out a search for your given keywords from the luxury of your hotel room in Las Vegas, and you’ll probably see different results than you would at home on the East Coast, in the UK or in Germany.
So which one is correct? All of them. And none of them.
Logged in & rose-tinted search results.
If you’re logged in to any Google service when you search (AdWords, Gmail, Analytics etc.) then you’ll be enjoying the benefits of personalised search. This also factors in previous searches to provide a more personalised experience.
Personalised and objective do not make good bedfellows.
Ah, but what if you’re using a service that not only isn’t logged in, but also takes an average of your rankings from different locations in the world?
Wouldn’t that make rankings more meaningful?
Unfortunately not.
Long tail and the discrete majority.
You’re already familiar with the idea of long-tailed keywords – those little micro-gems that are searched far less than the big & obvious keywords.
Long tail keywords are often overshadowed by the so-called low hanging fruit, yet when you combine all those small figures, you may see that they outweigh your main keywords.
So your main keywords may not actually mean that much anyway.
The numbers may mask the truth.
The problem with focusing on numbers and numbers alone is that you may be blind to what’s actually happening.
Consider the following hypothetical example.
Let’s say you were a small software marketing company based in the UK, and one of your high-performing keywords was software marketing service. It may not produce much by the way of quantity, but when it comes to quality, nothing else comes close.
Every day you go to Google and type in the search software marketing service.
Every day you see that your results are in second place.
As an SEO-savvy company you do your best to optimise your content for that page, but you just can’t seem to make a difference.
Click on the first result, however, and you’ll see something quite significant.
The company in first place doesn’t actually offer software marketing services.
So your second-place ranking isn’t quite the slap in the face it may appear. It’s impossible to say how much more traffic you’d receive by being in first place, but being out-ranked by a non-competing company really isn’t worth losing much sleep over.
Your position or rank in Google’s listings is not only affected by where you’re located and whether or not you’re logged in, but may only play a small role in a big picture when it comes to who you’re competing with. All of which may be dwarfed into insignificance by the combined performance of your long-tail keywords.
My conclusion is that rankings are very much the SEO metric of yesteryear. It’s time to move on.
