Dear Client: I Love You, But Will You PLEASE Stop Obsessing Over Your Search Engine Rankings?

Dear Client:

I love you. I really do! But please, for the love of all that is good and holy, will you stop obsessing over search engine rankings?

I get it, you hired me to perform Search Engine Optimization on your website. Why do we optimize for search engines? For rankings, right? Well, no, not anymore. It's been almost a decade since the SEO industry began it's turn toward a fuller website marking experience, looking beyond search engine rankings as a metric of success, and instead looking at business growth, conversion rates, and return on investment.

Rankings are a traffic delivery mechanism. Traffic can be hit or miss. Not all traffic is targeted. We see it all the time, clients like you are looking for rankings for your industry terms. But, quite often the time and effort needed to rank these favorite phrases holds no value compared to the conversions it delivers. That means, the ROI just isn't there.

Instead of focusing on these "pet" terms, and potentially wasting thousands of dollars in the process, I could be focused on building exposure through some other relevant terms that have a better conversion rate and give you a much higher return on investment.

I understand where you're coming from: You need rankings to get traffic, and you need traffic to get conversions. But, would you be happy if I could help you get more traffic and conversions, even if your favorite keywords were not ranking? Would you trust me if I told you that not all the keywords you care about are valuable?

I hope you hear what I'm saying. I totally understand that you need exposure on the search engines to get the traffic and the conversions you need. But, rankings for certain high-traffic, low value keywords isn't going to give you both. Oh, you'll get traffic, but you'll see your conversion rates plummet.

My question to you is, who will you blame when you see conversion rates go down? Is it the design team, the usability team, the marketing team, the SEO team? It may not be anybody's fault, except that you're ranking well for very poor converting keywords.
Finding Keywords that Deliver

In an ideal world, EVERY industry related keyword would bring you quality, converting traffic. But, a few minutes looking at the keyword research data will tell you otherwise. Every industry has thousands of terms that are not relevant for any particular site within that very industry. It's true for your competitors, just as it's true for you.

Good optimization is all about finding the right keywords. Not just industry terms, but terms which match the searcher's intent for the product, service, or information you offer. Sometimes the searcher's intent is clear in the search phrase. Many times, it's not. If the intent isn't clear, you can do two things: Guess or test.

Guessing at the intent means you either assume it is a valuable keyword or it isn't. In SEO, this can be a huge gamble. Guess wrong, either way, and you are either potentially wasting a ton of time, or you're losing out on a lot of potential conversions.

The better option is to test. The best way to do that is via PPC. Throw up some ads using your testing keywords, and see what happens. If the keyword converts at a rate comparable to other keywords, then you have yourself a winner. If not, you just saved yourself from wasting a bunch of resources on optimizing a loser.
Rankings Don't Always Matter

If you know all your keywords are winners, you still have to be careful about measuring rankings over results. There is a lot more to a good conversion than ranking for your best terms.

Did you know that in some circumstances you can actually get more traffic by ranking lower in the results? It happens all the time. Why? Because your title and description tag are written to drive the click and conversion more so than to get rankings.

You can tweak your title to improve clicks and conversions, and that may cost yourself some ranking positions. But, if you tweak it for rankings, you may lose both clicks and conversions. It's not always win/lose, sometimes you can win-win, but the better wi

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