B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Your search engine ranking doesn’t matter all that much

September 25th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

All too often, we run into clients who tell us (or simply act as though) search-engine ranking is the most important goal of their online marketing.  Truth be told, in many cases it’s not really the goal of the marketing exec nominally in charge of the effort, but that of someone one or two pay grades above his/hers.

So we were glad to come across Todd Miechiels’ piece for Rain Today, Your Search Engine Ranking Doesn’t Matter (as Much as You May Think), in which he contends that the pursuit of rankings is really indicative of a newly-discovered but not-so-rare disease called Ranking Obsession Syndrome.  People with this syndrome come from big and small companies alike;  even the wisest of business leaders can fall victim.  Sadly, it causes otherwise savvy business people to obsess over their organic search rankings, when in practice they have little or no control over day-to-day results.  It’s a lot like a non-professional long-term investor checking the stock market indices 8 times a day.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t become alarmed if… your rank in the listing for some significant keyphrase suddenly went from page one to page 10+  …certainly you should.  But mostly, you should be focusing your attention and resources on things that you do have a reasonable level of control over, like your website’s conversion rate and the rate at which those conversions eventually turn into orders.

Accordingly, Todd’s piece offers a 4-step program for breaking free from Ranking Obsession Syndrome:

• Optimize your website as best you can …especially if you haven’t done it in awhile.  Most critically, ensure that your content is current, relevant and tightly themed around the phrases you want to rank well for.
• Verify your keyword selection to ensure that you’re pursuing phrases that people in your target market actually search on.  It’s of no use to rank #1 on “convertible frammis” if no one ever searches on that term.
• Get more inbound links from quality sites that are relevant to yours.  There are many ways to foster this:  write articles for other websites;  send out optimized press releases;  post comments on others’ (relevant) blogs.  And of course, the toughest one of all:  put an original document up on your site that is so compelling, other sites will link to it as a service to their visitors.
• Focus on conversion and ROI;  they can almost always be improved.  Doubling your conversion rate will produce a dramatically better return on investment than time and money spent trying to improve your organic search-engine rankings.

It’s not that search engine rankings aren’t important and valuable – of course they are.  But they’re only one indicator of the overall health of your search engine marketing.  Just try to keep a broader perspective, look at the whole end-to-end chain of your click-to-sale program, and don’t get fixated on any one component.  For help on this, try giving your Web marketing consultants a call.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Search Engine Marketing