What Is A Result In SEO Terms? Part 4 – Rankings

Fiction #1: The more rankings the better.

Fiction #2: Rankings = Business.

Perhaps I should clarify here a little. The above points don’t have to be fiction. But whether or not they are depends entirely on you.

The first reason for this is a no brainer. As per Part 1 of this blog series, if you’ve chosen the wrong keywords then ranking for those keywords is a pointless endeavour and a complete waste of time and money.

The second reason is that if you are not paying any attention (or more importantly: acting upon) your analytics data then the helpfulness of ranking for anything at all becomes a game of chance.

As talked about in the previous part of this series, rankings are the means to an end, the end being leads. Simply choosing a list of keywords (even good ones), getting yourself ranking for them and then sitting on what manages to filter through is a lazy approach which will cost you potential customers.

Let’s look at an example:

A customer is looking to “buy product X online”. Naturally this is what they search and luckily you rank for it! But when they land on your site, they get completely lost, don’t get the information they want and/or can’t figure out how to contact you. Or perhaps contacting you is just too difficult.

Here you have a keyword which you rank for and is bringing you traffic, but if you are not looking through your analytics to monitor customer behaviour you might be completely unaware that these customers are dropping out at particular places on your site.

You’ll then be under the impression that this keyword was not worth targeting. You might then abandon this keyword for all the wrong reasons and spend time on less valuable keywords purely because they’re coming through a sales funnel which works, albeit not as well as the other keyword could.

So with that in mind let’s redefine the first to points in a more truthful manner:

Truth #1: The more rankings for good, researched keywords the better.

Truth #2: Rankings + Analytics Data + Action = Business.

Stay tuned for the final part in this series, dealing with SEO Maintenance.

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