Rank is stupid: How to really measure your SEO campaign

One of my pet peeves is SEOs that attempt to measure the effectiveness of their work by “rank.” Not only is this an inaccurate way to judge your campaign, but it also leads to problems and missed opportunities. This is why evaluating an SEO campaign with rank is stupid.

UPDATE: I wrote this a couple of years ago. Now that AI is rolling out (even into Google with AI Mode), this article is more relevant than ever since rank is obsolete in an LLM world. Although many tools are emerging claiming to give you visibility into LLMs, they are just trying to take advantage of SEOs who still think it’s about rank. Rank is now officially dead.

Why is rank stupid?

I’m a firm believer in accurate measurement for online marketing campaigns. Our ability to measure our results makes online marketing far better than traditional marketing because, with good measurement, you can see what’s working and what’s not rather than guess (or, as they might say, “project”). Since we can measure our efforts, we can fix them or move on to a different marketing channel if something isn’t working. If it is helping- do more of it!

When people use rank to measure their SEO campaigns, they cannot do this consistently. This misunderstanding only perpetuates the stereotype that SEO is a sham, as people see rank fluctuate while their business isn’t growing. We need to get over using rank to measure our SEO efforts.

Don’t oversimplify your SEO by putting it into “rank.”

People who want a summary of how an SEO campaign runs can fall prey to easy metrics that don’t help them. The worst are vanity metrics that stroke their ego and don’t grow their business. Of these vanity metrics, the worst is rank. Ranking is one of the things that we think will be wonderful. “Oh, if only my website and company could rank number one for [insert your favorite phrase here], we’ll finally have achieved SEO success.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way because there’s no such thing as an objective rank for your web pages in the search results.

Your” rank” depends on your location.

Everybody gets a different search result when searching for even the exact phrase. That’s because several factors affect their search.

For instance, where you search affects the results you see. Now, we all see this when we search for restaurants. We want a restaurant. I’m in Charlotte, North Carolina, so if I Google “I want an Italian restaurant,” it will give me something nearby. It wouldn’t be helpful if Google told me there’s a great Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills. Google helps me by giving me relevant geographical results.

Even if geography does not limit your company, Google still considers where the search occurs when it provides search results. So even though you and I might search for the exact phrase you use, you will get different results unless you’re in my office and at my computer.

Your” rank” is personalized.

Your search history also makes rank unobjective. Google likes to help its users. It wants to serve the user the most relevant result. One of the things it considers is your YouTube history, your Gmail account content, and other factors. There’s a reason why Gmail is free, after all. Google uses all this data to decide your search intent. It provides search results that match your history and interests. I have a very different search history than you because we’re just people interested in other things. Therefore, it’s tough to say objectively whether what I see ranks the same as what you see.

For example, a client was so excited about their SEO campaign that they would wake up and type their favorite keyword phrase into Google every morning. “Ooh, where do I rank today?” they would wonder. They would click on their page when they saw their result and ask, “What did David do today?” The following day, they do a Google search and ask, “What does David do to make me rank today?” and click on their search results. The next day, they searched and clicked on their search results. The next day, they click…. and so on.

The client soon told me, “David, you’re amazing! I rank number one.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, look here. Here is a screenshot. I ranked number one.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes. Thank you so much.” They decided they wanted to stop their SEO campaign.

They only ranked number one because Google saw them clicking on this page. Google said, “Oh, they must like this page. I’m just going to help them out and serve them up as number one.” So, the client thought they had achieved success in SEO. In reality, Google had given them the desired results, even though not everybody else had seen the same search results.

In addition, you must remember that Google is a mind reader. They want to determine your intent when they serve you search results.

Let’s say, for instance, we’re searching for “China.” You may be a traveler, and China is on your bucket list. When you search “China,” Google knows you intend to travel, so it will talk to you about tours to China, how to see the Great Wall, and cities you can’t miss in China.

But I’m more interested in politics and economics. So when I type a search for “China,” Google may give me different results, including more news-oriented information.

What ranks number one for “China”? It depends. Everybody gets different results based on their particular intent, not their history or where they search. There’s no such thing as objective ranking.

I had another client who desperately needed SEO to work for them. Every day, they’d Google themselves, and they would see that they weren’t number one. Distraught, they would click on all their competitors and ask, “Why are these people outranking me? What are they doing better than me?” Pretty soon, the client’s site wasn’t even showing up in Google for them. They called me furious and asked, “Why is this SEO not working?”

“It’s working. Here’s the data,” I offered.

“No, it’s not working. I never find myself number one.”

Apparently, Google identified them as not liking this particular site—their website—so it didn’t serve it to them.

Rank doesn’t exist

Anyone following Google has noticed fundamentally different things about how it works over the last few years. Between BERT, MUM, and other changes, Google is getting better and better at judging the intent behind a query. If you run a PPC campaign, you probably notice another trend (since it’s a privacy violation to share search queries that generate organic search visits, but it’s okay to share them if you pay for the click): people are asking Google long questions rather than short, sentence fragments. Gone are the days of someone searching for a “New York lawyer.” Soon, Google will know what you need and serve pages according to what machine-learned algorithms think you want. Under this new reality, rank becomes useless as it is overwhelmed by the infinite combination of phrases for which your customers could find your business.

In an episode of Search Off the Record (around 14:30), John Mueller has a very insightful monologue about ranking factors. He discusses that rank will always be inconsistent because there are several ways to “get there.” Let’s suppose he’s telling the truth (some might be cynical about anything straight from Google). In that case, an objective measurement of rank doesn’t exist.

This assumption is behind many click-bait “SEO is dead” articles. When rank can no longer be accurately measured, some SEOs throw up their hands and say, “You can’t do SEO anymore.” Baloney. You just measured SEO wrong. SEO is alive and well and can still help grow a business.

“Rank” makes you miss opportunities.

The worst part about ranking as a metric for SEO is that people can miss something significant. There are many ways someone could search for what your company has to offer. And if we laser focus on 1 or 2 (or 100) different phrases, we could miss out on things our customers seek. Besides that, we experts in our field can search for our products and services differently than our customers. For instance, clients will often use industry-specific abbreviations or technical jargon that their customers aren’t necessarily aware of. So, if you focus on rank as a metric, the biggest problem is that you can miss significant opportunities.

Is traffic a better measurement?

Many marketers understand that rank is not a particularly valuable metric when discussing SEO. Instead, they try to shift to traffic. Traffic may be a better way to measure SEO because we could think about it as a way of averaging rank. We could rank in the search for any number of phrases. As we start to rank better, we will begin to see our traffic increase. Traffic is a better way of measuring our SEO results.

Sometimes, traffic can be misleading. For example, a client made exhaust stacks for paper companies, oil refineries, and other plants. Their former SEO company started helping them focus on “exhaust stacks.” Soon, their website got a ton of traffic for “exhaust stacks.”

Unfortunately, many people looking for exhaust stacks (in fact, the majority of people looking for exhaust stacks) were thinking about the things that go on the back of a pickup truck. They don’t need an industrial paper plant exhaust stack. So, even though this company was getting traffic for exhaust stacks, it wasn’t helping them. Traffic was a misleading metric.

Regarding this traffic, we must also remember that seasonal volume fluctuations significantly affect traffic. I love delivering a January report to my clients because I always look like a rock star. I must have worked hard every December because Januarys always have significant traffic. Or budgets return, customers get back from holidays, catch up, and have to catch up on all their obligations and start purchasing items. Januarys are just a big months for most companies- even those who don’t do SEO. If we only look at traffic, we could ignore seasonal fluctuations that have nothing to do with SEO success. Be careful when measuring traffic when evaluating your SEO campaign.

UPDATE: many of the most popular LLMs (ChatGPT and Perplexity, for instance) are adding UTM codes to links to other sites. These codes clarify which LLM is sending you traffic in Google Analytics. Currently, however, Google is not distinguishing traffic from AI Mode, AI Overviews, or traditional SERPs- that traffic is all lumped into “Organic Search” as a default channel. Still, you can measure your traffic from LLMs.

For SEO success, measure customers

We’ve discussed what not to measure—rank and even traffic. Now, let’s talk about the most important metric for SEO: the metrics that help justify our efforts financially. Our SEO campaign should generate new customers, leads, or sales. We should measure it to know how many customers, leads, and sales it generates.

This isn’t difficult. Want leads? Count the contact forms submitted by the marketing channel. Are you selling products? Make sure your checkout system reports data when someone checks out and what they paid for so we know how they found us in the first place. You can even use a phone call tracking system to ensure we can keep track of calls coming in by the source of their traffic. Hence, we know that an SEO visitor generated a phone call.

Once we know our SEO efforts generate income, we can say, “Great! We’re getting a ton of new customers from our SEO efforts. How do we get more?”

“Well, to get more customers, we need more traffic.”

“How do we get more traffic?”

“Great question. We need to rank better.”

If we focus on the customers and leads, metrics like traffic rank have a context that becomes valuable. Instead of focusing on rank as the end, we focus on the rank that leads to traffic. But we don’t end there. Rather than focusing on traffic, we look at the rank that leads to traffic leading to customers. This is how we should successfully and accurately measure our SEO campaigns.

UPDATE: Thanks to the UTM codes that LLMs are adding to links, we can measure traffic and leads from LLMs in Google Analytics. So far, we’re seeing that LLMs have an EXCELLENT conversion rate (albeit off a significantly smaller amount of traffic). This is because LLMs “steal” informational traffic, but if you need a product or service, they have to send people to your website to convert.

The right metric leads to more success

Let’s face it: SEO is not free. We need to pay our SEO team or a consultant. We must pay our developers. We have to buy good web hosting to keep our sites up. We might have writers to help produce content. All these efforts cost time and money. However, suppose we measure our SEO campaign based on customer acquisition and sales. In that case, we can show that our SEO initiatives generate revenue. Now, when we go to our boss and say, “Hey, we need to hire more developers,” we can justify the expense.

No matter how big your company is, you have limitations. You only have a large budget to spend on this department. Even with unlimited money, you only have so much time in the day. Besides that, you’re fighting with other departments for developer resources. To win those battles, make sure you can justify the cost of these changes to get more. You can do that if you measure the right thing.

The bottom line is that we need to measure our SEO and LLM efforts based on generating customers, revenue, and leads. Once we do that, we can stop reading these oversimplified reports that don’t tell us the whole story. And instead, get an accurate look at our SEO campaign so we can continue to improve it.