Search Ranking: Reports of Death Greatly Exaggerated

Web site Statistics

Ami Isseroff

November 23, 2008

As I remarked (see Personalized Search: End of SEO?) some people are very unhappy about "ranking." Do they mean Google Pagerank or do they mean "rank" as in the position of a Web page in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? They don't say.

But those people all want to get rid of rank, whatever it might be. Because they don't want to have to promise their customers #1 positioning or high Google PageRank, which are hard to deliver. Maybe they don't even know they are two different things.

So of course, someone had to ask Google oracle Matt Cutts, Is Ranking Dead?

Mark Twain, the American humorist, once responded to a false newspaper story about his death by remarking, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

Cutts is a diplomat and replies, like a good oracle, with the news that people want to hear and can interpret as they wish:

"I'm not sure I would say ranking is dead but it's not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It's great if you're ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn't help you very much."

"The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don't worry about 'can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.'"

If you ignore rank, says the oracle, a great empire might not be destroyed. Or it might, then again. A Delphic pronouncement. Suppose you ask a doctor if oxygen is important to your life. He or she will say, "Yes, but you also need to eat and get exercise for a healthy life."

"Trophy Phrases" are the result of desperate attempts by poor SEO consultants who try to convince clients that it doesn't matter that they can't rank highly for popular Keyword Sex, or Maps. He will get them #1 ranking for [Sexonomy] or [Maps of Sex are very good]. Matt Cutts is right about that. If you are number 1 ranked for a phrase but nobody is searching for it, you won't get any visitors.

But "conversion" is not more important than rank or page and Cutts didn't say it is. It is not a substitute for high positioning for popular keywords, and for that, high pagerank helps.

It's simple really. Let's say I have a site for selling Widgets. It is a lousy website, and only 50 people a week come to it. Schlock SEO consultants Inc comes along and says "Matt Cutts says the problem is conversion. You have only 1% conversion. All the visitors are coming to your main page. We are going to double your conversion."

So they work and work, and at the end, 2% of the visitors are getting to the product pages and buying things. That's great. It means I make one sale a week instead of one sale every two weeks. In 10 years, this improvement will pay for the services of Schlock Inc. But what was really needed of course, was to expand the site and improve it so that it would get 10,000 visitors a week. Schlock Inc. doesn't know anything about the widget business so they can't advise me on how to put good content in the site or tell me who might be interested in linking to my great article about the theory of virtual widgets. But Matt Cutts never said you should ignore "rank" or PageRank. If nobody sees your site in the listings, they won't get to it, and you won't have any visitors to convert into sales. OH!

Ami Isseroff