7 Reasons Why Search Engine Rankings Aren’t Everything

We’ve been in the search business, since 1997, in fact. The optimization world has changed an enormous amount since then. Google has taken over the market, and search, frankly, has just gotten better. And from an optimization standpoint, the landscape is completely changed. Back in 2000 or so, the SEO firm had a single metric: the all-important ranking report. And for the time, that was largely all you needed. Tell me where I rank for my top 100 keywords, and as a customer, I can see the value that you bring to me. Well, the ranking report is becoming only a small part of the way that search engine optimization proves its value to its customers, and a small part of the overall story. Here are 7 other things to think about along with your ranking reports:

1. Quality Counts: Before you even look at a ranking report, you ought to dispassionately evaluate the quality of your site. Compared to your competitors, compared to how it looks in your imagination, compared to how you drew it up on the back of an envelope, does your site provide quality information? Is it well written? Does the title of your page match its intent? Does the page serve a purpose (like moving the customer further down the sales funnel)? If not, then no matter how well that page ranks on a report, it will not help you grow your business.
2. The World Is A Big Place: If your site doesn’t allow for interaction and sharing, then it is an island, trapped by its own shores. Search rankings are terrific, but the most vital and long lasting sources of traffic are those from people who have had interaction with your brand. Allowing visitors to share your brand and their experience (positive or negative) through comments, or sharing tools like AddThis make your brand interactive. (Don’t fret, if you run a quality web site, provide good customer service, people will say nice things about you, and if they don’t, you get a chance to learn, correct and move forward!)
3. Traffic and Conversions: I can guarantee that if your site is ranked number one, or two, or even ten for a high volume keyword, you will get more traffic. That is cool. But, if your site isn’t doing anythng with that traffic, then frankly where you rank doesn’t matter. Focusing on what your site does with traffic is significantly more important that how much traffic you get. Imagine that you were never able to grow your traffic. What would you do differently? You’d focus on getting maximal value out of the traffic that you have. What happens if your traffic growth rate is 0%, but you double your conversions? Well, folks, you DOUBLE your business. Traffic is a meaningless statistic. Having a quality website that leverages the traffic that you have is critical.
4. Video, Audio, and More: By temperment and trade, I am a writer. I like to think in sentences. Not everyone, however, is like me. Some folks are visual learners, and yet other like to listen. Not all potential customers will want to interact with your site in the most obvious ways. Video and audio engagements are critical to allowing new on ramps to your brand. If you run a website about horses, how valuable would a dressage video be? How important could it be for your brand to have that be the most watched dressage video on YouTube? Or the most downloaded dressage podcast on iTunes? These aren’t just nice to have kind of things. These are critical branding expentions, critical customer on-ramps, and truly critical modes of interaction. Do these items show up in search engine rankings? Not really, but they are amazing ways to draw new customers to your brand. Ignore them at your peril.
5. Conversations: The world is just full of conversations. At the coffee shop, on the train, at school pick up, conversations happen everywhere. And conversations often spur recommendations which spur more conversations. Does your web ranking matter when a conversation in your industry happens? Probably not. However, being able to monitor those conversations, on places like Digg or Twitter DO matter. Engaging with customers, potential customers, and the unitiated offer you a chance to prolong your engagement (or start one) with your customer. Search is incredibly important, but the forums that have the most vitality and influence are’t the search engine result pages, but rather the pages full of conversation that are happening across the entire web spectrum.
6. Channels: Channels is a marketing and sales term. In the business, people need to narrow down and categorize the interactions they have with their customers. Is it on the website, or a magazine article, is it in Twitter or through a text ad? There are millions of ways to interact with a brand or product, and very few of them start with a search engine. But the process of website optimization allows your website to be the clearing house for all of these interactions, and a great optimization team can create a useful set of metrics and measurement tool so that you can view not on specific channel interactions, but all interaction so that you can get a clear and full sense of your brand impact. All channels lead to your website, make sure that it is ready.

So, ranking number one for a broad search term is great. It can be, and often is, a great driver for your business. But don’t get obsessed (or maybe even all that interested) in where you rank organically as a measure of how good your brand or site is. There are new metrics, more than clicks and sales that help you understand your business and the ways that your potential customers interact with it. It is broader than search. It is the engagement principle. Seek to engage with your potential customer, through a You Tube video or Flash game if you are B2C or perhaps through a webinar if you are B2B. These kinds of engagements, stretched out across all of your digital marketing can dynamically propel your traffic in an even more profound way that a high ranking can. Search is a powerful form of interaction, but it is not the only one. Here at SpinShark, we like to think of search as the most basic form of social media there is. It is scalable, efficient, and powerful (and, the more people that find your business worthy of their click, the more prominence and clicks you will get). But search is perhaps the cornerstone of your social makreting engagements. With a powerful search presence, you can benefit from all of the opportunities delivered and promised by these new conversational, recommendation based interactions. We believe that search builds your business, but it is also the first building block in creating an effective and powerful social media experience that will help customers interact, engage, and become involved with your brand and products. And those customers are compelled to create a lifetime bond with you. And that, my friends, is something that you will never glean from a ranking report.