Recently, Google made a change to the HTML that displays the search engine results. A side effect was that a lot of the automated ranking checkers broke (as did the autonumbering of search results much to our temporary dismay).

However, an interesting offshoot was the amount of buzz in the blogosphere about whether ranking reports were important or not. Now I’d seen this before – SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin famously commented some time ago that “rank checking is so 1999”.

But it is something that is easy for clients of an SEO company to understand, and generally, something they request. However, ranking reports don’t tell the whole story, and that seems to be the main problem. Here’s a great defence of ranking reports and another, talking about how they are an essential part of the analysis because without them you don’t have the whole story either.

Interestingly, the author of that last link also wrote a couple of great posts that are almost counter arguments, but actually illustrate the potential abuse and misunderstanding of rankings reports, including the excellently titled “If a Ranking Falls on the First Page, But There is Nobody Around to See it, Does it Still Make Any Difference?”
and one on working out if the rankings actually matter.

So, fascinatingly, there is an element of interpretation that a good SEO brings to ranking reports. Here at Vertical Leap we automate some of this with Apollo’s Search Analytics which we have been using for the past 3 years to quantify whether a ranking is worth keeping. Apollo alerts us if a ranking is not “pulling its weight” – we take care that the keywords we are targeting are ones that will bring traffic to a client’s website, it is one of the things that in central to the way that we manage a campaign.

I obviously agree with Stoney deGeyter’s views on evaluating rankings, because here is yet another post of his I enjoyed whist reasearching this blog post where he talks in detail about working out how much a ranking is worth.

Rankings are a long way from being the only SEO metrics that we look at, the size of the long tail is a great measure of SEO success for instance. But it is also important for us to understand what the KPIs are for a customer and to not forget that we need to find out what is important to a customer about their search engine rankings to make sure that they are receiving the value that they need for their business to grow.

Posted in Blog | Comments Off