SEO Ranking Reports are Worthless

SEO professionals are a funny bunch - there are certain people that we follow religiously until they say something that we disagree with, at which time they are totally wrong about everything. Case in point; Matt Cutts of Google yesterday apparently said that SEO ranking reports are worthless. A lot of SEO practitioners are up in arms about this and some are interpreting it as saying don't do SEO. I don't think that was what he was saying and I actually agree with what Matt said about SEO ranking reports being worthless. Here's why - it does echo something we've been saying for very long time. There's a couple of reasons why SEO ranking reports are worthless. First of all, due to personalized search, you can have two people sitting at a table, Googling the same thing at the same time and they can get very different search engine results. That is a pretty good indication why SEO ranking reports are a waste of time. The second reason SEO ranking reports are worthless is the way that Google keeps testing how it displays its search engine results pages. I don't know if you've noticed this but they do tend to test a number of different layouts at different times and different locations. So being judged on ranking results can get you in trouble if that is how you are being judged for your SEO efforts. The third and main point here is that SEO is just a means to an end. It is not the end in of itself. So the whole purpose of doing Search Engine Optimization or SEO is not to rank, but should be focused on achieving a strategic objective. That strategic objective is typically about increasing yield, increasing conversion, increasing traffic - whatever it might be. So the question is, why don't most SEO professionals focus on the more strategic objective like increasing yield. I think the answer is that if you ever looked at a SEO page or a page that has been build just for ranking, you'd understand why. While they are going to rank very well and get a lot of traffic, the conversion rates are typically horrible because the pages are ugly. So the advice here is to focus on yield, build your SEO campaign like you would other campaigns; treat your SEO channel like any other channel and focus on the strategic objective. Don't ever do anything just for the search engines. Focus on the user and that way you will never be disappointed.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• SEO Ranking Reports
• SEO
• Digital Strategy

[TeaPips]

Great video. Very informative. Interesting Canadian accent btw, I couldn't help but hear an English accent following in and out. Anyway thanks for this video, I will show my manager, this all backsup my point!

[nassersahlool]

@TeaPips Thank you - I hope it helps you. I know that convincing people of this is very difficult, but it is critical to do so that they aren't disappointed. Also, I think there are some videos by Matt Cutts at Google that make the same point - check them out.

Regarding the accent, it seems to be moving inexorably westward across the Atlantic the longer I live here. By now, it's somewhere over Greenland.

[sandiegoseoSD]

I disagree that they're pointless. The reason is you need a base or metric in order to track trends. If you're monitoring rankings and you see a drop in traffic/sales you can check rankings to see if phrases dropped. While you shouldn't focus on them, they're a valuable tool to have in your campaign.