Rank Checking, It’s not worth the effort

Posted by JohnCarcutt
January 12, 2006

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

I know many will try and point out the idiocy in this idea, however I plan on standing my ground. Like many of the posts I make, the original source for the idea was a question I answered on a SEO forum. The question was “How do professional SEO people check the rankings of the pages of their websites in search engines if you don’t use programs such as like WebCEO or WebPositionGold to check your rankings?”. My answer was simple; “You don’t need to.”

SEO Pier Pressure – “If Your not #1, your a Zero”

Many new SEOs or Clients looking to purchase SEO for the first time are naturally going to check out rankings. They are pushed into many rank checking tools which are “needed” for SEO and often asked “Where do you rank for {keyword}?”. The average perception of SEO is a skill set used to optimize a site to place higher in the search engines. They are told checking rankings the best way to validate SEO. They are basically pressured into a life of rank checking and fluctuation stress. What they don’t understand, but will hopefully learn with experience, rank checking only exposes a very small portion of the information they need to understand their traffic.

Sure, it is a “Cool” thing to say “Woo Hoo, I’m number one for {keyword}!” and everyone wants to be in the Cool crowd. But for those who really understand search traffic, its much “Cooler” to say “Woo Hoo, My traffic is perfectly targeted!” or “Woo Hoo, I have 150% ROI!”. Ever notice that the real Cool people don’t worry about being Cool, they just are.

But then they say, “Higher placement means more traffic.” Ok, this can be very true. How does checking your ranks help? Which terms are you checking? What about other terms? There are many more paths to “more traffic” than higher rankings and most of those paths will provide higher rankings naturally in time. SEO is not about rankings. Its about providing exposure to a site via the search engines and rankings are only one small portion of that goal.

Rank Checking is Limited Knowledge

Ok… your not convinced. I do understand, rankings is a mantra that has been beaten into SEOs for quite some time now. It wont be given up so easily. Can we at least agree that the bottom line is getting people to your site so you can accomplish your site’s goals. Yes? Good.

Now if you are a rankings checker, common sense tells us we can assume that you are tracking the most of the common key phrases people use to find your site. You will check a phrase on the engine and look for one of the pages on your site to show up. Easy. What might be of interest to you at this time, is that those base keyword combinations probably only account for about 25% of the terms surfers use to look for your product or services. One site I work on has about base 150 basic keyword combinations. That site usually is found by surfers using over 10,000 different search terms a month. If you are only tracking your base phrases, you only know what is happening on those phrases, which might only be a very small section of your incoming traffic. You would be surprised at the weird searches that people make to find you product.

Still not convinced? The owner of one site I work on likes to check rankings. He used to complain to me that we were not moving up as much as he wanted. (he wants #1 on everything too) Last week we reported in 2005 we had a 300% increase in organic traffic over 2004 and he didn’t understand how since the rankings had not changed much. I explained to him that since the improvements we made to the site were not based only on the 50 keyword phrases he tracks, he did not see the areas we were improving in. Again, if you are only tracking a base set of keywords, you only know what is happening on those words, not all of your incoming traffic.

The “Cool” SEOs Alternative to Rank Checking

The only way to get the “big picture” about your site is to learn to love your log files. Most log analysis software packages include the ability to identify incoming traffic by keyword used. In many cases you can even click the live referrer link on the keyword and be taken to the exact search results page the surfer came from which would include the rank of your page. The important thing here is the programs will show you ALL of the keywords surfers used, not just the ones you think are important. Would you have thought to track “Blue Widget that fits in the closet” or “Widget closet sized Blue”? Surfers get VERY creative when forming search phrases and most are very different even when looking for the same thing. Your log files will show you every one.

You can get much more information from your log files than you ever could tracking rankings.

What about searches that surfers make that you don’t show up for. How can you get this information. I guess you could track a phrase that you don’t place for, but then what about all the variations on that phrase. It’s just not practical. This is where SEO gets tricky. If the site has a “site search”, track those results via your log files too. You can then identify search phrases within your site which returned “no results” and BAM, you have a new key phrase or topic to build a page around. You can’t do this type of advancement with just rank checking.

The Dark Side of Rank Checking

I pointed out earlier that new SEOs and Clients are basically steered towards rank checking via peer pressure. However, there is a growing number of SEOs and non-SEOs who use rank checking as a sales technique to sell their services. Most of the time these are via cold calls or email spam, so they should be suspect right away. However, those folks may have one or two phrases where they have been able to get good rankings then tout these as examples of their great work. Most of the time these examples are on obscure or misspelled terms. But the forceful sales pitch and “obvious examples” via rank checking can wear down resistance. More than one webmaster has been duped into purchasing a sub par service due to rank checking examples. Examples that someone more knowledgeable in the industry would have seen as bogus right away.

Some unscrupulous individuals take advantage of the general belief that Ranking is the most important benchmark in SEO. It is not.

Rank Checking is not Completely Useless

Ok sure I will admit, I know where I place for most of my basic terms. However, I do not spend a chunk of time every day checking those rankings or creating reports on ranking movement. The search engines fluctuate on a regular basis. One site which tracks movement in Google of their top 1000 key phrases {RankPulse} shows none of the top thousand have a “TOP 3″ which is historically fixed. Everyone is constantly changing their sites to place better so movement is inevitable.

I will also admit that rank checking is one way you can evaluate how well SEO changes made to your site perform. It can also be used to gather information on competitors or alert you to any problems you may have in your indexing. However, these are specific tasks to determine specific results. A quick check every once and a while is probably a good idea, however, no need to schedule X hours a day or create a system of weekly reporting on rankings. That kind of focus on ranking checks is a huge waste of time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Yes, take some time to see where you rank for some terms. But don’t focus on it, you can find much more productive ways to spend your time improving your site to get more traffic and better conversions. Rank checking only shows you a small portion of your traffic picture. Learn to utilize your log files to see your whole traffic picture.