Measuring SEO Results

Measuring and reporting the results of SEO efforts has grown over the years. I know a few SEO practitioners who maintain that their only job is to get rankings and nothing more! I simply cannot accept that. One of the goals of SEO is to gain rankings, of course. But the natural result of those rankings is to increase the visitors to a website. Then, I want those visitors to do something—to reach a goal, accomplish a conversion action such as subscribe, register, or purchase! Ultimately, SEO is a business‐building activity and should be measured as such.

This means that rankings are not the primary measurement of success. They are an indicator, but not the final measurement.

The Problem with Measuring Rankings

Measuring SEO results by rankings is a moving target. Many factors prevent the objective measurement of actual rankings. The results are influenced by many factors, and two people can see very different results, even sitting next to each other or working in the same office. The next sections discuss just a few of the influences on rankings.

Localized Results  Primarily, search results are first delivered based on the searcher’s location. The vast majority of searches are conducted on a mobile phone, so the search engines primarily provide results based on location and favor local businesses.

Search History  Another factor that influences the results is your past search history. This information enables Google to develop personalization factors and information or industry preferences based on your usual activity. While this will not heavily influence results, your history informs how certain phrases or concepts should be weighted in the results.

SEO Software Reports  Any SEO tool or software program has to query Google to gain rankings data. However, to comply with Google’s terms of service, they need to have a token or an API access to Google. This enables them to query a certain number of times or a number of queries in a day and only from a designated server so that the ranking reports do not take up valuable resources from human searchers, and so that ads are not shown to reporting queries.

Because of this, the rankings are coming from a centralized server and not from servers that humans are using. The data may be out of date, may not be using the latest algorithm, or have not updated based on the last crawl. The rankings reports produced from these tools or software are good as a comparison and trending view of a website’s progress or ability to hold consistent rankings. If you choose to track rankings daily or even weekly, you’ll see many changes back and forth and predictable swings of one to four positions, gained or lost. For this stage of reporting, a level of consistency is the desired outcome.