Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [28]
This goes back to the account that I related in Chapter 1, where my website ranked highly in multiple search engines for many terms, yet the sales came from a direct link. The decision to invest time and money in rankings and search referrals would have been the wrong decision, because that was not the direct cause of profits. This is the point where we realize the principles of marketing and, even more, direct marketing apply also to online marketing. There is a difference between visitors and qualified visitors. Finding the qualified visitors and investing in those channels will provide a better use of time and resources than the scattered “shotgun approach.” More doesn’t equate to better. Better is better.
Your Rankings Reports Are Wrong
In later chapters, I will cover analytics and measuring your business goals, because the task of building an equation of rankings, visitors, effectiveness, and goal completion will provide a better analysis of true success in your marketing efforts. Take your marketing beyond the rankings, and find the true factors in your success. Otherwise, you could be wasting valuable hours in optimizing and rankings for words that don’t work for you. But now, I would like to outline a few examples of why rankings reports are outdated and the wrong measurement for success.
Ranking-Report Software
Search engines do not like ranking-report software. Period. Software-automated search queries drain resources and bandwidth and inflate ad impressions, which are used to compute quality for pay-per-click ads. Therefore, Google is particularly aggressive about blocking repeated queries from the same computer or business. Google would rather keep advertisers happy than serve overly aggressive search marketers who check their rankings incessantly.
To satisfy marketers who need to check their rankings, search engines have allowed access via an application programming interface (API) key. It is a code that tells the search engine who is accessing the database and the program accessing the data. This allows the search engine to direct automated software using the API to specific data sets and resources. Without utilizing the API key for the reports, you could be temporarily blocked from accessing the search engine. (Google in particular is aggressive about these types of programs taking resources away from its core service of serving search results to “real” searchers. When Google detects that too many searches have been requested from the same source and at regular intervals, it simply shuts down your access. You get a page that nicely tells you that you are blocked from further access as the result of too many automated queries, from either a computer virus or other software program.)
If you do use the API key to check rankings, what will be immediately apparent is that the results from the rank-checking software will show rankings for your website that are not consistent with the live results. It is more accurate for a client to simply open a browser and search for words and rankings manually. Having someone run a rankings report to share with others is inaccurate by nature. Be sure to explain to anyone involved the expectations that the results from automated rank-checking software may be different from what they will see in their own searches. However, rank-checking software is good for checking trends at the outset of a project. Tracking large jumps in rankings after optimizing multiple pages of your website is the best use. Tracking the movement in rankings is unreliable when tracking small changes (such as a move of a web page from a number-five ranking to a number-three ranking).
Personalized Search
With the advent of users creating accounts with the search engines, personal search histories have been accumulated. Personalized search is important to the search engines in many ways, not the least of which is personalized advertising that can be crafted solely for you, based on your preferences, search history, and associated accounts. Personalization will affect search results