I often tell prospects that if our company is able to help them grow their business without getting a single one of their keywords ranked on Google, we’ve done our job. It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially for businesses that come to us to help increase their search engine rankings.
You’ve probably read me say the above. You’ve also probably read me say this: We don’t rank websites, that’s Google’s job. Get these two statements together for a little pow-wow and what is the result? The realization that, in the grand scheme of web marketing, rankings don’t matter.
I’ll give you a moment while you get some water to wash down that bitter pil
The reason why rankings don’t matter is because SEO agencies that focus on keyword rankings are often focused on the wrong keywords. If your claim to fame is keyword rankings, you have to have something to show for it, and any easy-to-rank keyword will do. The problem is, while using rankings as a metric looks good on paper, the keywords chosen are often just paper decoration. It looks pretty but doesn’t move the needle on growing the business.
Keyword rankings are still an important part of web marketing. But they are a means to obtaining business growth. They are not business growth itself. Rankings can tell you something about your presence on search engines (if you’re combining that with search volume and customer targeting metrics), but they do nothing to tell you about your presence in the social sphere, your messaging to your visitors or your ability to convert those visitors into customers.
Again, all of those are good things to pay attention to as a means to achieving growth, but without business growth, none of that matters at all. So while we don’t want to ignore rankings, we can’t focus on that. Our job is to help businesses grow. Period. End of story. Stick a fork in it because it’s done. If the business grows because of our efforts, you win. If business doesn’t grow and we show you all kinds of other metrics that don’t matter, we all lose.