Following on from last weeks post about how SEO people should be trying to perform, I had a thought about something that appears to be common across nearly all SEO companies I have worked with in the past, and how wrong it is.
Picture this, you have a website, and an SEO monkey putting some stuff together for you on a monthly basis to report how well you’re doing. From my experience, most companies seem to want to issue you with some form of keyword rankings report…
“Oh, lookie here sir, we’ve now got you to the number one spot on Google for the term “web design company horsham bob mitchell cheap”! We’re going to make you millionaires!”
Hang on a second there chummie. This is all very well if I have all of my customers searching for terms that are very specific to my business, but they aren’t, they’re searching for all sorts of things.
In fact, as a website owner, I do not give a fuck what my users are searching for, I only care that they are coming to my site, and doing things which generate me income/profile/whatever the point of having the website in the first place is.
SEO people should be reporting on their work with analytics and conversion rates, not how great you are at appearing on terms that no-one gives a toss about.
Search engine optimisation is not a black art that’s only doable by some sort of SEO wizard – it’s a measurable level of marketing that will return you measurable results.
I disagree a little bit with your assertion about keyword. Sure it doesnt make much sense if I have a company selling “widgets” and I am ranking #1 with the search term of “midgets”, but I wouldn’t know that people are landing on my site after searching for midgets if I didnt look at the keywords that people are searching for which lead them to my site. If someone is searching for midgets and lands on my site selling widgets you can be sure that they will stay only long enough to hit the back button.
But if know what keywords people are using before landing on my site I can perhaps tailor the content of my site to address more the topic of my site, or make sure that when someone searches for widgets that I show up in the first position in the search results.
So yeah keywords do mean something, but it’s only one part of the whole of SEO and too much emphasis on only one thing won’t help in the long run.
I think you’re talking about something here which is very slightly different. Whilst I agree that keywords are important in your analytics (i.e. what words are my users looking for when they find me), knowing what ranking I have on keywords/phrases that I have chosen is pretty much irrelevant.
Another aspect is knowing where your SEO is wrong, for instance, if you are finding lots of midget hunters arriving on your widget site for whatever reason, it’s good to figure that out and correct the problem (possibly a typo?
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