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For years, many website owners have measured the success of their SEO campaigns by rankings – continually checking their rankings for their keywords, see how their competitors are faring and generally become a bit obsessed with top 10 positions on Google.
But, rankings are not a good measure of success. You shouldn’t be using rankings to work out if your online marketing efforts are working and there are a few good reasons for this:
1. Personalised search – many people search in Google within their ‘iGoogle’ account. Google personalises searches based on search history and people can even personalise the listings themselves while logged in, so what you see isn’t necessarily what someone else sees.
2. Data Centres – Google has several data centres in different locations which deliver search results, so again, you may be looking at results from a different data centre to someone else.
3. Rankings do not reflect whether a visitor thinks your website or your offering is any good. If visitors arrive on your site and immediately surf away again, your site may not be doing its job.
4. A website’s rankings are not static – the search engines often change the way they rank sites to get rid of spam and inappropriate results and to keep results fresh.
5. Rankings are no indication of traffic, your keywords may not be targeted properly or the way your website is displayed in the results (title and meta description tag) may not incentivise anyone to click on it.
If you really want to know how effective your SEO campaigns are then you should be studying your web stats much more closely and working out which key performance indicators are the most appropriate for you and your business. We’ll cover this more in future posts!
