Sphinn - Keyword Ranking Report Catch 22: Part I

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Sphinn It!

Went Hot: June 4, 2008 - 3:52 am
Posted By: hugoguzman 397 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blog.zetainteractive.com)
Category: Web Analytics

Those of you who work for yourselves likely never have to deal with this, but for those folks working in-house gigs or agency gigs, running ranking reports for a given swath of keywords is likely one of the most frustrating and demoralizing prospects you come across during the course of your work.

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from hugoguzman 397 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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Mark Pilatowski made an interesting point.

He says that his SEO shop tries to steer clients away from rankings and towards analytics but since all other oufits deliver rankings they feel forced to do so as well.

Ain't it the truth!

As an industry, we need to start moving away from that logic.

from onreact 396 days ago #

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Yeah, rankings do not work anymore, unless you check them at different locations or for small markets (in German/y you rank everywhere the same).

from hugoguzman 396 days ago #

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Interesting insight, onreact. In the end, even if you're in Germany, it's still all about traffic and conversion.

from MariosAlexandrou 396 days ago #

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Rankings on there own are a poor success metric, but they still have value. Yes, your search results might look different than mine, but as a trend, ranking data can sometimes be useful.

I recently wrote a post (http://sphinn.com/story/45715) where I explored ideas for adding value to the typical ranking report by applying weighting factors to the rankings so the rank alone wouldn't determine success or failure.

from hugoguzman 396 days ago #

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@Marios - There is some value to trended ranking data, but again, the point is that ranking data is faulty and limited by data center and frequency of reporting.

Even if you pulled rankings on a dialy basis (which very few outfits do...most pull the ranking data a few times per month at most) the data center issue renders those trends more or less useless.

It's all about ROI. An hour spent pulling and analyzing ranking reports or an hour improving interlinking strategy or link-building or pulling analytics data?

The answer is fairly simple when you look at it that way.

P.S. Your link doesn't seem to be working.

from Winooski 396 days ago #

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Bob Massa recently had a post I dug (but didn't Digg...Dugg...) where he essentially said that a metric's importance is in the eye of the beholder:

I always watch indicators and as for the term "important indicators", that's a subjective term. If you think they are important – you're right.

In that context (e.g., if your client's rankings-obsessed), you may have to pay the piper, no matter how cacophonous the tune.

from hugoguzman 396 days ago #

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@Winooski - well said!

from thenotself 334 days ago #

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I recommend the ranking reports at http://www.keywordenvy.com as an example of ranking reports 2.0. It combines your ranking, with analytics data and conversion tracking to calculate an ROI per keyword, in addition to conversion rates and traffic metrics. Very interesting new service!