SEO Metrics: What Is Beyond Rank Tracking?

Ever found yourself tracking your website rank every day and obsessing over it?

Breathe.

Rank tracking is not all you have got to measure your SEO success.

Keyword ranking is one of the over emphasized metrics to measure the success of an SEO campaign.  Yes, you have to ensure that keywords are regularly tracked for website positions but getting obsessed can cut other important factors dead.

Challenges with Rank Tracking

The very first thing search engine optimization tries is to rank your website in the top position in the Google’s search engine result page. But putting too much emphasis on this metric to rate the success of the entire SEO campaign is too risky.

The search results aren’t always consistent because of many reasons. One of the key reasons is the regular updates to the underlying searching algorithms which take many things into consideration before ranking a keyword. Most important amongst them are:

1. Location of Search

The location from where you are searching decides what kind of results you are going to see in the result page. Not just it plays a crucial role in the local searches, but it also affects the organic ranking as well.

An Example:

Let’s say you are searching for “shopping malls” in a city, the search results will display the mall in the local region, and if you search for the same in the city you have just traveled to, the results will be malls in that city or town.

2. Intelligent Search Results

Every search engine continuously refines your searches to make them more relevant to you. It means these algorithms are busy learning your search preferences and deliver the results based on this intelligence.

3. Competitive Keywords Vs Long Tail Keywords

Most of the times, the optimization effort goes in ranking those keywords which are high on competition. Is such an obsession required given the fact that majority of the searches are the long-tail keywords?

Ranking these long-tail keywords is easier, and they drive more accurate traffic to the website. So it is worthwhile to have a strategy which involves a variety of long-tail keywords and lead to a web traffic which is genuine and more relevant.

• Design Changes

If you are making any design changes to the website, in all probability, you can expect the rankings to go down regardless of how good looking the new website is. Although the rankings can improve, you’ll have to ensure that the new site is optimized even before you launch it.

Also Read: SEO Services USA Is A Predomination In Increasing Website Rankings

• Loss of Good Links

The rankings may also suffer if you lose some of the quality backlinks. It may happen that the pages you linked to no longer exist or the link to your website was removed. Some high-quality, engaging content can bring the required traffic and lead to improvement in the ranking as well.

• Hosting Isn’t Good

If you recently changed your hosting, it may be a reason for the search engines to rank another website before you. Your website must be able to give high-quality experience to the visitors who may be looking for a fast page load speed.

These factors alone are capable of altering the ranks significantly. There are many more factors which are behind the ranking, but going after each of them can consume too much time. If you are obsessive about the ranks only, other areas will start to get suffer. Can you ignore an engaging blog or an article which can drive relevant traffic to your website?

Focusing Where It Matters the Most!

So what should you do to avoid getting obsessed with keyword rankings? The answer is simple. Focus where it matters the most. Try to get the traffic which can be converted into a sale or a successful business transaction.

For this, you have to think which keywords (long-tail ones) can drive more relevanttraffic to the website. As the volume of these target users increases, it will reflect in the analytics as well. There are many analytics tools which can tell where the users are coming from and how your site is performing in the search.

Going For Keyword Indexes

Although keyword rankings are not an accurate indicator of website success, yet they must be tracked to find the key trends. An extension of this idea is the use of Keyword Rank Indexes.

In this, instead of reporting on particular keywords, the rank of a query class is taken into consideration. So what is a query class? It is an aggregation of all the keywords which belong to the same idea; the product or service, so as to form a coherent group.

For Example:

If you are optimizing for an online store, every product will have a query class. In this, you are indicating on one number. This figure is the average rank of the bundle of the keywords. The way this figure varies states where your web traffic is being directed.

Average Rank of Bundle

So while drafting an SEO strategy for the website, you must not be obsessed with the ranks only. As more and more online users are getting aware, they are looking for product or service which can meet their needs in a perfect way. It implies that you should consider putting even more emphasis on the quality or the product and services which will enhance the overall experience of the customers. Happy customers may write good reviews for your product and recommend your website to their social circle. It may bring additional traffic to your site.  To build a successful online business, you have to go beyond SEO and use other digital marketing ideas as well.

Also Read: SEO Services Company: Website Rankings Induced High