Why Rankings Are Not the Holy Grail of SEO

Achieving high ranks for the keywords in your SEO campaign is important and necessary. However, far too much emphasis is sometimes placed on the importance of keyword rankings, thereby leaving other elements of good SEO lost in the shuffle.

It’s no secret that rankings fluctuate, sometimes on a daily basis. With ongoing changes in search engine algorithms, along with other factors such as competition, your keywords can often appear in different spots from day to day.

Keyword phrasing also plays a big part. The addition or omission of simple words like “in” or “near” can alter the rankings and make you appear higher or lower depending on the phrasing. And Google’s location services play a part as well. Searching for something locally (where Google detects your location) brings up different results than if you have location services turned off.

So what does all this mean in terms of providing good SEO, and why do rankings appear so prominently in the monthly reports?

Keyword rankings provide an easy-to-understand report of the progress of an SEO campaign. Visualizing the rankings gives a client the satisfaction of knowing that progress is being made and that people are actually able to find them in the search results. But what happens beyond that?

Let’s assume that you, as a client, rank at the top for most of your keywords. Someone doing a search on one of those keywords will see your listing in the search results and chances are good that they will click through to your website. Will they be satisfied with what they see? You may have a thousand visitors each month to your website, but if all of those visits don’t translate into more clients then rankings suddenly don’t seem so important.

One of the many factors in determining whether a site is relevant to a visitor is the “bounce rate.” The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who go to a site and “bounce out,” never going beyond the home page. A lower percentage is obviously desirable here, but if a visitor doesn’t feel that the information presented is of value to them, they will simply go to another site in the search results – likely your competitor.

The quality of your website content, the ease with which a visitor can access the information they’re seeking, and something that grabs their attention all come into play here. You may have the most beautiful website among your competitors but if these important factors aren’t in place then there’s no reason for someone to stay on your site.

You must ask yourself: Is there anything about my site that makes people want to stay? Am I providing visitors with the information they’re looking for?

Each industry is different and has unique demographics. You, more than anyone else, know your market and what appeals to them. If your website doesn’t successfully capture that market then it’s time to make adjustments.

So, while rankings are still very important and something that should be given constant attention, your website is someone’s first impression of your business and you want that first impression to be the best one.