Rankings: Not the Way to Measure Your Success!

The days of measuring your SEO success based on your rankings are over! Interactive Return has continuously encouraged its clients to look to their on-site performance in order to determine how well they’re doing, in addition to focusing on gaining higher rankings in search results. Don’t be left behind!

Jill Whalen, the CEO and founder of High Rankings, discussed this very topic in an article for Search Engine Land; which inspired me to talk about it here. She outlined several reasons why rankings are a poor measure of success.

One of these reasons focuses on the fact that rankings don’t guarantee targeted traffic. Don’t be fooled by SEO companies that offer high rankings for words that no one is searching for; because the point is, people still aren’t on your site! If you are optimising your pages for keywords that are not commonly searched for, be aware that your optimisation efforts may be wasted as well as giving you the wrong idea about how well you’re doing.

Not only do rankings not guarantee targeted traffic, but they also don’t guarantee conversions or sales. If you are receiving the wrong type of traffic or no traffic at all, then you’ll see no change or increase in conversions or sales.

Additionally, remember that rankings are constantly changing. There are many reasons, but some may be a result of the fact that Search Engines are finding more ways to deliver relevant searches. They will often use your IP address to determine your location and deliver results based on that; so your search from one location may deliver different results elsewhere. In addition to search results that are geotargeted, personalised search is becoming more and more of a reality. Google and Yahoo are continuously finding ways to offer search results that are specifically targeted to your own preferences, based on your previous searches. All of Google’s free tools and applications help them to learn more about you and make more specific recommendations based on that information. Eventually, this means that no two people will see the same search results; proving that your ranking will become less and less important in the near future.

The experts at Interactive Return understand that in order to achieve client goals, there’s more to success than your search engine ranking!

Emer Lawn, Online Marketing Executive, Interactive Return

One Response to “Rankings: Not the Way to Measure Your Success!”

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