It’s usually one of first things you check when you have a new website built: where does it appear when you search for your products or services on Google? Are you ranking at the top of the page or above that competitor that’s been outperforming you for years?
I know business owners who check their search engine positions daily; opening up a web browser, typing in the search box and hoping to see an improvement in their rankings. It can get a bit obsessive.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s satisfying to see your website move up the rankings, especially when you’ve invested in a new site or SEO services. It’s exciting to see your website at the top of page one for your chosen keywords and watch as your competitors move down the page. (As an SEO, it’s kinda what we live for!)
But, your position in search results isn’t always the best metric to track, at least not in isolation. Firstly, the problem with checking your own rankings on a regular basis is that it may not be giving you a true representation of where you actually rank. Google is likely to show your website higher than others as it’s a site you visit often. This is due to Google showing users personalised results based on their browsing history. To get round this, it’s best to use a different browser, go incognito/use private mode and make sure you’re logged out of any Google accounts.
Even better, try using software to track your positions for you as this will eliminate any internet history interfering with the results you see. Services such as SEMrush.com and SerpRobot (free versions available) are good for this.
Secondly, whilst a higher a position in Google is likely to get you a higher click through rate and thus more traffic to your website, it’s not always that simple.
You could rank at position one in Google and not receive a high level of traffic if:
- You’re optimising for keywords that very few people search for. This can happen when we work in a business for so long that we forget that our customers might use different terminology for the products and services we provide or we may offer a product or service that people find via other channels such as word of mouth and rarely via an online search.
- Your listing doesn’t look relevant to the searcher. When we focus on crafting the perfect page titles and meta descriptions for our web pages, we’re often thinking like a search engine and what they will think is relevant. If we forget about the user, there’s a chance our page titles and meta descriptions won’t look relevant, attractive, or even make sense to our potential website visitors, meaning they scroll past our top-of-page-one listing and click on the competitor below.
In either of the above scenarios, tracking your search engine positions wouldn’t give you a full picture of how well your website and SEO is performing. After all, our end goal is to generate traffic that leads to sales or enquiries.
With this in mind, the metrics we track should include:
- the number of website visitors we receive from organic search – this will give us some indication as to whether there’s actually people searching for your chosen keywords and whether your page titles and meta descriptions are compelling enough to get them to click;
- the number of conversions (sales/leads) you receive from this traffic. This will give you an indication as to how well your website is performing in providing sufficient information and ease-of-use to convert visitors into customers;
- the conversion rate. This will give you a metric to compare against other channels to determine the quality of traffic you’re driving to your website.
Only when we look at all these things combined, can we really assess how well your new website or SEO campaign is working.
In conclusion
Whilst tracking your positions on Google search seems like a quick and easy way to check whether your website is doing its job, we’re merely scratching the surface in terms of whether it’s generating you any traffic and, more importantly, sales. We need to be looking at the data in our Google Analytics reports to get the bigger picture. If your reports show traffic to your website is increasing with a healthy conversion rate, then you no longer need to obsess over your search engine rankings!
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