It's Not (Just) About Rankings

Every now and then someone will ask me “how do I get onto page one of google?”. Or someone will tell me they’ve got a number one ranking for an obscure search term.

And while having lots of page one rankings is a good ego boost it’s not really what you should be focusing on.

At the end of the day your goal is sales. And before that, your main goal is to initiate a relationship – usually by getting visitors to sign up for a newsletter or ongoing communications.

A page one ranking is nice. But if it’s for a phrase that no one searches for then it’s of no value.

In the early days of setting up your online strategy you must figure out what your target clients are actually searching for and work to get ranked for those phrases.

The best (free) tool for this is google’s adwords external keyword tool. You don’t need an adwords account (but it’s better if you do) and you don’t have to be running a campaign. It will tell you roughly how many searches are made per month for the keyword phrase globally and in your local geography (country for most geographies – state in the US). It will also suggest related keyword phrases that it believes similar people may search for too. So you can use it to identify related keywords to optimize for.

I actually use a tool called Market Samurai which takes a lot of the work out of keyword research – and also shows you the level of competition for the keyphrase and how much advertisers are paying for the phrase. It has a free 30 day trial period – and the keyword research and domain research tools remain free for ever even after the trial ends. If you want the full features it’s a hundred bucks or so.

It’s also important to try to get an understanding of the intent behind the keyword search. There may be lots of searches for “free jokes” for example – but it’s unlikely anyone is going to buy much from the sites they go to.

Early on in my online career I optimized my site for searches for “business consultants” – thinking it would catch searches from people looking to hire a business consultant. I did my research and it was getting a lot of searches. And I did well too – I got to a ranking of number 3 in the UK – way ahead of the major global consultancies.

But unfortunately, it turned out that the vast majority of people searching for “business consultants” and coming to my site were looking for a job as a consultant – not to hire one.

One way of figuring out the intent of a search is to see how many adwords advertisers there are for the search phrase. Lots of advertisisers consistently over time means someone is making money with that keyphrase. So it’s likely it’s a “commercial” keyphrase. Market Samurai can also show you how much advertisers are bidding on the keyphrase.

A final reason why a high ranking may not be so valuable is if no one clicks on it.

It’s become common practice for bad SEO companies to try to boost the ranking of their client’s site by “stuffing” keywords. They often fill the title tag (which appears in the search engine listings) and the page description with a list of keywords like “Supply Chain Consultant | Manufacturing Analysis | Lean Six Sigma”.

The truth however is that the title tag doesn’t count for much in SEO terms these days. It can help against very weak, unoptimized sites – but against solid sites it has limited impact. And the page description has no impact on your ranking at all.

However, both the title tag and page description appear in the search engine listings – as read by human beings. Listings with title tags and descriptions stuffed full of keywords and written for google are much less likely to be clicked on than lower ranked sites with titles and descriptions written for human beings. Titles which describe the value the vistior will get by going to the site and descriptions with a call to action – perhaps even making your free report offer in the description itself for example – are much more likely to get clicks.

So: do your research. Optimize for the right (commercial) keywords. Write your titles and descriptions for human beings. And focus on clicks, signups and sales – not rankings.

Tags: keyword research, SERP rankings