Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:18:20 by Pete Handley
There is a lot of discussion ongoing within the SEO community about the importance of rankings as a metric for a Search Engine Optimisation campaign. Many are saying that rankings are no longer a relevant SEO success metric.
In some ways I agree with this. Certainly companies that are purely working on improving rankings as the only measurement of success for a campaign are decidedly flawed in their approach.
At Vertical Leap, rankings are one of a number of factors that we review, but by no means does achieving a prominent ranking mean that we sit back and rest on our laurels. When a keyword achieves a top 10 ranking in a major search engine, we have a series of measures in place that review the quantities of traffic that is driven by this phrase.
If it traffic isn't statistically significant after the keyword has been ranking for a period of time, then we'll consider dropping it in favour of another- or test a few more (related) that have the potential to bring traffic to the site in the volumes that we want to see.
Even then, the ranking here is just a means to an end - the ranking itself is only really of any importance if it's bringing good levels of traffic to the site and getting visitors to convert on the site. Sometimes a phrase may not bring lots of traffic, but may convert at a high rate, and in those circumstances we will want to ensure a prominent ranking here is maintained.
One of the most important metrics that we look at in an organic search engine optimisation campaign is the number of keywords that are driving traffic to the site. Many people call this looking at the long tail phrases - and many of my campaigns have thousands of different phrases bringing traffic to the site on a monthly basis, and this figure, when things are going well should always be growing, especially if there is regular content being added to the website.
It's impossible to look at tracking the rankings of all of these phrases as its difficult enough to track them for the 20-or-so keywords that we usually look to benchmark on one our optimisation campaigns. However, just because we don't track these rankings, it doesn't mean that a prominent ranking doesn't exist for a phrase - because the phrase is driving traffic to the site, it does suggest that a ranking exists for this somewhere in some engine - if it didn't, how would any traffic have been delivered?
Many SEO companies, as I have already mentioned, only work to improve a ranking for a particular phrase. In the long term, this isn't likely to be a successful way to run an SEO company, because as increased levels of personalisation and geo-targeting become more of a factor, its quite possible that people will get very different results for rankings - dependant on location of the searcher and the previous queries that the user had been searching for.
In short, rankings remain important to SEO, but in isolation a ranking is worthless without an assessment of what that ranking can deliver to a business in terms of traffic and conversions. Tracking rankings with any accuracy is likely to become more difficult in coming months and years with location and personalisation becoming more of an issue, and when that occurs the value of tracking rankings is likely to diminish. Until then, we will continue to track rankings as part of the overall monitoring for a campaign.
Pete Handley
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