I came across a great ‘Whiteboard Friday‘ post by Rand over at SEOMOZ today. He’s does a great job of explaining both sides of the debate about whether measuring organic search rankings for individual keywords is important, or at least the most important seo metic.
So many SEO agencies and their clients alike focus attention on reporting their rankings for specific keyword phrases. One problem with this approach is that the the search results are constantly changing. A search for keyword phrase ‘X’ in one place at one time may yield a different set of results than a search for the same phrase somewhere else at the same or a different time. Also, as the search engines become better at delivering search results, I think we can expect more fluctuations in search results based on news events, geo-targeting and many other factors.
It seems that a good way to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign is to measure the actual quantity and quality of overall traffic, as opposed to search rankings for individual keywords. Focus on your ultimate goal (converting users) and not on having bragging rights for ‘owning’ a given search query. Then again, explaining this to clients can be a bit of a challenge. Maybe try sending them a link to Rand’s video…
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