Search engine ranking tools are not best practice!

There is a certain fascination with people using search engine ranking tools to check search engine rankings and find out if they are moving up or down the search engine results pages. Success in online marketing and SEO in particular is deemed to have been reached when a company has their target keywords in the top 10 search engine rankings. I’d argue however that being obsessed with keyword search engine ranking is the last thing you should be measuring success against.

Checking search engine ranking is actually counter intuitive as it gives very little insight into how your content is really performing and leaves you at the mercy of algorithm changes from the search engines – rankings only ever gives a limited insight into your online progress. As long as you’re happy with your content marketing strategy, below is a list of specific focus areas where you’d be much better advised to measure success against in your organic online marketing campaigns.

Keywords Driving Traffic – You should constantly be reviewing your traffic sources and especially (assuming you’ve integrated Google Webmaster Tools into your analytics), you can see what queries your site is showing for, or to put it another way, what keywords Google is saying your site is relevant for. This treasure trove should be used as a funnel for content ides for your blog. You can also filter your queries here to target keywords were you are appearing on the second page of the SERP, between position 11 and 20.
Top Landing Page Review – What pages are driving the most traffic? it’s very important that your monitor where the majority of your traffic is landing. There are two main reasons for this, one is that you can analyse how this page is performing in terms of conversion rate and if there’s anything you need to change/update to positively influence conversion and the second reason is that analysis of your top trafficked should influence your internal linking strategy. Your top pages in terms of traffic are also probably your most linked to pages, so good to look at leveraging that link juice.
Web/Social Engagement – What do people do when they visit your top pages? Do they bounce straight back out? Do they hang around and view other pages, do they leave comments if it’s a blog page, do they promote your content through social sharing? If these types engagement are not happening you need to ask yourself why? Is your content not as engaging as it should be? Are you giving people the opportunity to share, are your social sharing buttons visible? Are people asking and replying to your content and most importantly are you engaging back, i.e. replying to comments on the blog?
Device Access – more and more it’s important to look at how people are accessing your content. Do they use mobiles/tablets or desktops. If your site is like most others, mobile will be driving increasing amounts of traffic. The question for you is, how does my content render on a mobile/tablet device? Is the Customer Experience (CE) on a smart phone as good as it could be?
Demographics – where is your traffic coming from? What the geographical location of people who are searching and finding your website? This can be another opportunity to target specific locations with keyword rich content, e.g. instead of just using the keyword phrase ‘top 10 search engine rankings’, if you find a lot of your traffic is coming from New York, you can target that location by extending your keyword phrase top ‘top 10 search engine rankings New York’. There are obviously other techniques you should be using for location targeting but having relevant keyword content is not going to harm your cause.

So, 5 simple techniques you should be employing instead of constantly looking to check your search engine rankings.

What about you, do you obsess about your rankings, or have you learning to evolve to more efficient metrics?