Why Your Search Rankings Don’t Matter

I am often baffled by the number of clients who are increasingly requesting using SEO for the sole purpose of boosting search engine rankings to beat their competitors. Many clients only want their rankings improved and don’t appreciate the value in optimising his their website. These Clients often are only interested in outranking their competitors.

I find this surprising, although after speaking with a few other industry practitioners, I hear this is not uncommon.

Sure, outranking your competitors will likely bring more traffic to your business’ website, but this won’t necessarily result in more leads and conversions for your business.

A recent study had the following to say about lead generations which is also relevant when considering the quality of leads generated from SEO:

Source: B-to-B Lead Generation: 2009 Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation Study, Marketing Profs Research Insights, 2009

Improving your Search Rankings is only one piece of the puzzle.

Why? Keep reading.

A successful Search Engine Optimisation campaign can be executed by using the 4 fundamental principles I have outlined below:

1. Keyword Research – It’s all good and well to know which keyphrases you want your website to rank for, but it is far more important to know how users behave online when searching for products and services your business offers. Research into this will provide insights into how many searches your keyphrases receive so you can make informed decisions into the keyphrases to target for your business. You may also find that the keyphrases you want to rank for actually receive very little traffic and that users search for your services in a completely different manner to which you predicted. This information is critical to the success or failure of a Search campaign. Just because your competitors rank for certain keyphrases, doesn’t necessarily mean your business should too.

2. Website Optimisation – The knowledge you have gained from keyword research can now be applied to your website. This means making sure important keyphrases occur in your website’s copy and code. This however is only one part of optimising your website. Your website’s design is also critical. A poorly designed website will result in high bounce rates. Your website not only needs to be aesthetically pleasing but also offer valuable information to the user and contain very clear “Calls-To-Action” so as to guide the user to convert on your website (more of this in my next point). A large button saying “Sign up here” or “Contact Us” can be the difference between a customer picking up the phone, or leaving your website altogether.

3. Goal Tracking – Understanding the way a user behaves on your website is important. By setting up analytics and goal tracking on your website you are able to identify important trends in user behaviour on your website. This data then influences future decisions to be made about your website’s design and IA in order to continually optimise your website and improve the user experience.

4. Link Building – This is the only aspect the above client was interested in, but with points 1 through 3, this is effectively a waste of time and money. Building links to your website will inevitably boost your search rankings. But without Keyword Research, Website Optimisation and Goal Tracking this won’t matter. You will inevitably generate irrelevant traffic, have high bounce rates on your website, have no way to measure the way users interact with your site and have no measure of return on your investment.

There you have it.

At Shifted Pixels we provide a holistic approach to SEO combining the 4 principles above and our success rate is high. If you are using an agency that doesn’t follow these 4 principles in executing your SEO campaign, you should question why they are not.