Why Ranking Reports are Useful
I read a column today saying that SEO ranking reports are effectively useless. These reports show how well your site is faring compared to its competitors for a selection of keywords. If you own a gardening company in Sussex, where do you appear in the Google results for ‘gardening company Sussex’ as opposed to ‘garden supplies Sussex’? At Artemis, however, we believe that these reports are a useful way to see how people are finding you, which, in turn, can greatly help your business.
The column said that it was better to focus primarily on organic traffic and conversions rather than ranking reports, but this seems a little odd. It’s great to know how many people are finding you and how many of those people are making a purchase, but it seems like a bit of a passive approach. If you want to actively pursue new business, it makes sense to find out how people are finding you. If you make your site easier to find for the people searching for your services, this can only be beneficial.
Another argument raised is that because rankings can fluctuate over the course of a day (or even an hour), this information isn’t helpful. However, Artemis consistently returns excellent ranking improvements in its monthly ranking reports to clients. A jump from position 8 to position 2 in the Google results suggests that we’re doing something good, even if positions jostle a little bit every now and then as more and more companies play catch up with the SEO leaders.
Factors such as localisation (helping you find services close to your current location) and personalisation (adapting results based on previous search behaviour) are cited as problematic for rankings. While this may have some impact, the reality is that it doesn’t affect rankings a great deal. There are lots of things it won’t affect at all. If I Google ‘Nigella Lawson’, I can be fairly sure the top results will be her own website and her Wikipedia page. It’s very unlikely to be affected by the fact I searched ‘vintage abacus’ half an hour ago.
The main reason our clients love our ranking reports is because even if it can’t give them a specific ranking for every moment of every day, it gives a great insight into the way people are searching, and the way they climb up the rankings month after month proves that the way we do things works. Check out our testimonials to see what people have said about the work we do.
