These search results were simple, direct, and easy to monitor. Google displayed ten blue links (not including ads) in their search results.

Originally, rank tracking was a simple affair. Today, rank tracking is highly personalized and focused heavily on search indicators like intent, context, and type. If there’s no improvement to revenue, no financial lift, you won’t sustain these rankings for very long. Gathering rankings for keywords that do nothing to move the needle means your search campaigns are unsustainable.

Rankings aren’t important on their own.

Your conversions, revenue, cost per lead, customer lifetime value, retention, and churn rates are more important than rankings.

Rankings aren’t as important as core metrics: Core metrics like conversions and revenue are far more important than rankings at the end of the day.

Combined with conversion and performance data (via web analytics), brands would have the data they need to improve their search campaigns. With SEO, many of your projections and ROI predictions are based on rankings. Originally rankings were intended to be a kind of benchmark brands could use to evaluate their performance in Google’s organic search listings.

They’re still promoting top ten rankings without context, giving organizations the wrong idea about their performance on Google. Most ranking tracking tools still haven’t accounted for these changes.

How can things be going so wrong? If rankings are up, why is your organic traffic down? This is the current state of ranking tracking today in the past, page one rankings meant a significant amount of traffic flowed your way. So why are your organic traffic counts falling? When searchers use your target keywords, you’re visible in Google. Your top five rankings across all of your web pages have skyrocketed.

Rank tracking google