When we first started doing online marketing in the mid-2000s, everyone was hot on their keyword rankings. “Am I #1 in Google?” It was a great question, because all you had to do was pull up the search engine, type a phrase relevant to your business, and immediately see whether you were hot or not.
But times have changed, and there are a number of reasons why looking at your keyword rankings just isn’t going to be as good an indicator as it once was. Does this mean that keyword rankings have no value? Absolutely not. But what it does mean is that you need to understand the context of any keyword rankings you are still tracking for your business.
Charting the Changes in Search Engine Rankings
Here are some of the big factors that have changed the keyword reporting landscape in recent years.
Personalized Search
This is one of the main reasons why keyword rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt (or several). Google long ago recognized that the best search result for a given keyword isn’t necessarily going to be the same for every searcher. An easy example is if you type in “bicycle repair shop” and you’re in San Diego, you’re going to want a different result than a person searching this term in Austin. Things get much more complicated from here, as Google now has the ability to customize search based on prior searches, social interactions, and many other factors. Bottom line: just because you see your business ranking well, it doesn’t mean everyone sees that too.
Decline of Regional Keywords
Before personalized and local search got big, people needed to help Google along if they were looking for something local by adding a region to their search term. So for the person looking for a bike shop in San Diego, they’d actually search “bicycle repair shop in San Diego.” But searchers are increasingly savvy to the fact that Google knows where they are, and their keyword searches are changing as a result. We use keyword ranking software that is sophisticated enough to check Google rankings in a particular region or metro area, but the results we get back aren’t foolproof.
Local Search
Also sometimes called “the 7-Pack,” these are search results that sometimes appear on a map view when Google’s algorithms determine that you are looking for a local product or service. Generally on a search results page with local search enabled, you’ll see some ads up top (of course), a couple organic search results, and then an indented list of local results with a map to the right. Then you’ll have more organic results below this local section. The challenge for evaluating keyword rankings is that this local 7-Pack of listings may or may not appear for a variety of reasons, and may or may not include your business for many reasons. Also, if you have an organic ranking on the bottom half of the first page, local results will effectively lower your placement and devalue that ranking.
Rise of Long-Tail Keywords
Sticking with our bike shop example, it’s obviously a good thing if a local shop ranks well for a very broad search like “bicycle repair shop.” No bike shop owner would turn down a page 1 ranking for that. But the reality of search these days is that people put in billions of search term combinations, and you might be surprised by the sometimes downright strange searches that ultimately result in a new customer. With so many businesses competing online, often it is a unique product/service or a unique way in which you talk about that product/service that connects you with a new customer. The bike shop actually may find that, because they are the only shop offering kids bikes with training wheels, longer searches like “where to buy good boy’s bike with training wheels” get them more business than more general terms typed in by people just starting their search.
Secure Search
While this doesn’t exactly have to do with keyword rankings, it’s another big body slam for people who want to know how customers are finding them. Starting in late 2011, Google began to block the keyword data that they used to share, showing exactly what terms people typed to find your website. There are some decent workarounds, but overall it’s just plain harder to get a good sense of your most valuable keywords.
Google’s in the business of providing the best possible search results for its users. Their never-ending quest to make searching better and more customized for the end user ultimately will make it harder and harder to figure out your keyword rankings. That’s why we steer our clients into thinking about online marketing success using a more diverse set of factors, including total monthly visits, organic visits, conversion ratio, social engagement, PPC investments, and others.
How to Use Keyword Rankings Now
We just rattled off a pretty sizable list of reasons why you might not want to pay much attention to keyword rankings anymore. But they’re not entirely dead yet. Here’s what we still get by looking at keyword rankings:
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An approximation of your SEO performance
If you take a wider view and look at your site’s performance for a broad set of keywords, rather than focusing on achieving rankings for a narrow set of terms, you can get a sense of how well your optimization and ongoing search marketing is performing and spot some areas where there’s room for improvement. Here’s an example: we have a client who is ranking very well for general plastic surgery terms, along with many specific procedure terms such as breast augmentation, liposuction and facelift. They are as good if not better than all their competitors for the terms we tracked in these areas. But they’re not ranking for some pretty important med spa procedures, while their competitors are. This insight gives us an action item: focus more content on these med spa treatments in an effort to connect with more people looking for these services.
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A check against how your competitors are doing
One of the best ongoing uses for keyword rankings is to gauge how well you are performing in organic searches versus your competitors. Here, we focus on a broad set of terms for each client and check their rankings against 3-5 other top competitors. While this isn’t going to give you an exhaustive breakdown of how you stack up, it does provide a pretty good approximation of how easy your site is to find for certain products/services compared to your competitors.
An Alternative to Focusing on Keyword Rankings
If we take a step back, keyword rankings aren’t really your end goal. So stop Googling yourself and put your ego aside a bit. People have continued to focus on rankings because they see them as a proxy for how easily customers can easily find them in the search engines. But here’s better way to look at it: simply put, is the traffic to your site coming from search engines increasing or decreasing? If you are doing a good job of reaching the right people on Google, they are going to click through to your site, and you can easily see in Google Analytics if more people are finding you through organic search. In this context, you should start to think more broadly about how and why your customers find you.
Here’s a challenge: start to think of everything you do in your day to day business as a ranking opportunity. If a news team is coming to interview you, that is an opportunity to create content and put on your website to get ranked. The video they film is another opportunity to post and rank. If you have a customer write you a testimonial, that is an opportunity. Getting reviews on external sites is another. Some funny thing that happened in your business might be worth sharing on your social media pages. Who knows, it might go viral.
For better or worse, the days of knowing exactly where your business stands on Google are dead. But SEO and online marketing are as alive as ever, and as important as ever as the race to reach new customers becomes ever more competitive. The biggest thing you need to keep in mind is not your rankings. Your biggest focus now needs to be on full circle engagement and a comprehensive web presence. Just having a good site isn’t enough. Just doing a great job with social isn’t enough. Just getting tons of positive reviews isn’t enough. Google has made it pretty clear that if you want top rankings, you have to put together a complete package. These days, it’s the cumulative effect of everything you do both online and offline that earns you top rankings and makes your business a success.