Benchmarking Current Rankings

People really love to check their search rankings. Many companies want to use this as a measurement of SEO progress over time, but it is a bit problematic, for a variety of reasons. Here is a summary of the major problems with rank checking:

  • Google results are not consistent:

    • Different geographies (even in different cities within the United States) often give different results.

    • Different data centers give different results (and you can hit multiple data centers from a single location at different times).

    • Results are personalized for logged-in users based on their search histories.

    • No rank checker can monitor and report all of these inconsistencies (at least, not without scraping Google hundreds of times from all over the world with every possible setting).

  • The Google API rarely matches up to what anyone sees in the search results:

    • It appears to match up only on very heavily trafficked, consistent search results; anything mid-tail or long tail is invariably inaccurate.

    • It is extremely slow to update, so even though news results or geographic results might be mixed in (or even new sites or pages that have a large amount of recent link growth), the API won’t update for days or sometimes weeks.

  • Obsessing over rankings (rather than traffic) can result in poor strategic decisions:

    • When sites obsess over rankings for particular keywords, the time and energy they expend on those few keyphrases often produces far less value than would have been produced if they had spent those resources on the site as a whole.

    • Long-tail traffic very often accounts for 70% to 80% of the demand curve, and it is much easier to rank in the long tail and get valuable traffic from there than it is to concentrate on the few rankings at the top of the demand curve.

So, indulge your desire to check rankings by going to the search engine and typing in a few queries, but be sure to also keep an eye on your visitor and conversion statistics.

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