Even
the most intelligent people can make decisions based on incorrect
assumptions. Columnist Dave Davies breaks down three SEO myths that even
rational people believe.
I
was scratching my head trying to decide what to write about this month.
Lately, I’ve been writing pieces that focused pretty heavily on
technical SEO — from my technical argument for quality content a few months ago to last month’s two-part series discussing two recently granted Google patents on how they learn to influence user behavior and guided buying systems with a focus on paid search results.
While
I’m obviously a big fan of the tech side of SEO, I thought perhaps it
was time to write something a bit more approachable. My head-scratching
ended when I got an email from a potential client in the high tech
sector, and within it was a simple and fairly logical assumption that
can (and likely would) have dire consequences if not corrected. This led
me to today’s article topic: three logical myths about rankings that
can destroy a business.
I’m going to begin this piece with the myth that inspired it.
Myth #1: All organic traffic is created equal
This premise has crossed my Inbox more times than I care to recollect. Here’s the core myth:
If we double our organic traffic over the next year, we will double our sales.
Now, this can be
true — in fact, in some cases, doubling your organic traffic can more
than double your sales. But one can’t approach SEO with this idea as a
core.
Let’s
take the prospective client, for example. They have site structure
issues and a large documentation area and blog. The logic is that if
you fix the site structure and internal link issues, you’ll start
driving more traffic to the documentation and the blog, which is filled
with great content. The problem, of course, is that this traffic is
likely to be lower-converting traffic, so hitting the organic traffic
targets can be done without hitting what really matters: conversions.
To
avoid myth one, the simple approach is to think about the various
sections of your site, put a value on those different sections, and then
create a formula to ensure that as you’re building out the strategy for
the various sections of your site, you’re taking into account the value
of that traffic.
Let’s
create a simple formula based on the case above. We have a site with
product and service pages, a blog and technical documentation. Let’s
assume that organic traffic landing in these sections does the
following:
- Site and product pages (represented by x below) — 6 percent conversion rate
- Blog (represented by y below) — 1 percent conversion rate
- Documentation (represented by z below) — 2 percent conversion rate
So, our formula for traffic entering the site at various points, assuming a $100 conversion value, would be:
$100 x (0.06x + 0.01y + 0.02z) = revenue
Let’s assume we have $600 in revenue today; that could be attained via 600 visitors entering at the blog:
$100 x (0.06 x 0 + 0.01 x 600 + 0.02 x 0) = $600
Or 100 visitors on the product pages:
$100 x (0.06 x 100 + 0.01 x 0 + 0.02 x 0) = $600
Or 300 visitors to the technical documentation:
$100 x (0.06 x 0 + 0.01 x 0 + 0.02 x 300) = $600
It
could also be attained with 50 visitors to the product pages, combined
with 146 to the blog and 77 to the documentation. You get the idea.
$100 x (0.06 x 50 + 0.01 x 146 + 0.02 x 77) = $600
So, if we want to double our revenue, we can’t simply double the traffic. Let’s look at the last example. We have:
- 50 visitors to the product pages
- 146 visitors to the blog
- 77 visitors to the documentation
This
gives us a total of 273 visitors. If we double our traffic, but the
additional 273 visitors are all entering at the blog, we end up with:
- 50 visitors to the product pages
- 439 visitors to the blog
- 77 visitors to the documentation
Enter that into the formula and you get:
100 x (0.06 x 50 + 0.01 x 439 + 0.02 x 77) = revenue
Which works down to :
100 x (3 + 4.39 + 1.54) = revenue
Which
gives us a total revenue of $893. So, we doubled traffic but only added
about 35 percent to the bottom line — not anywhere near our goals.
The
lesson? Not all organic traffic is created equal, but there’s a simple
way to figure out what the strategies you are deploying are likely to
yield so you can adjust and focus according to your business goals, not
arbitrary traffic goals.
Myth #2: It’s important to outrank your competitors
I
can’t even count the number of times that I’ve been contacted by both
clients and prospects with the statement, “Company XYZ is above me.
We’re better than them, and we need to outrank them.”
OK…
let’s take a beat and wrap our heads around what’s really being said
here. While the statement seems logical, what is actually being said is:
Company XYZ is above me for the phrase I looked up. We’re better than them, and we need to divert all energies away from pursuing ROI goals and focus on one single vanity phrase.
What
we need to remember is that none of this is actually about ranking for a
specific phrase. In fact, the goal of our efforts is not rankings at
all, but rather revenue. I don’t know about you, but if there were
higher revenue from ranking in position 21 than position 1, I’d be
working hard to get all our clients to the top of page three.
To aid in this, it can be helpful to not just look at keyword volumes using a tool like Moz’s Keyword Explorer (which puts the numbers in more realistic terms for organic search than Google’s Keyword Planner), but to use a tool like SpyFu to get a real picture for how a site is doing overall.
Let’s
look, for example, at a phrase I was researching just yesterday, “best
cpu 2017.” (Spoiler alert: I’m upgrading my machine.) Now, I immediately
went to the #2 organic search result because it’s Tom’s Hardware, and I
like the info (admittedly bypassing the featured snippet, which is also
Tom’s, because I knew I wanted to read about the different options and
applications).
Let’s
say, however, that one of their team gets a bee in their bonnet about
not ranking #1 in organic for the phrase and getting beaten by
Futuremark.com. What if they divert energies from creating new, rankable
content, or working on phrases they don’t rank for at all, to pushing
up for this one phrase because it’s the only one they’ve looked up and
fixated on?
This
is where a tool like SpyFu comes in handy. Looking at FutureMark, we
can get a decent feel for their rankings and traffic with:
Now, let’s look at Tom’s:
If
I were Tom, I’d be looking more at ranking for new phrases and perhaps
researching the types of phrases that are losing ground than I ever
would about focusing energies at a single position jump against a
competitor ranking for a fraction of the terms. And this is just an
example of the scenario I’m referring to. In other situations, people
may focus out of the gate on a single vanity term as opposed to a more
diversified (read: natural) spread of terms. If nothing else it can be
helpful to remember the following:
Diversity is security.
All
else being equal, it is better to have 100 phrases each driving 10
visitors than one phrase driving 1,000. As algorithms ebb and flow, you
will be impacted less by the whims of Google. Don’t fixate on your rank
compared to your competitors for one phrase — make sure you’re making
the right keyword decisions to maximize your ROI and resources.
Myth #3: Keyword tools are accurate
Bringing
people into reality is often a sad but necessary task. A lot of
potential clients include with their initial emails the incredible
search volumes for the phrases they’re thinking about.
Let’s
flash back a few paragraphs to the part where I mentioned using Moz’s
Keyword Explorer as opposed to Google’s Keyword Planner. Why is the
former more realistic? It’s because Keyword Planner is built for AdWords
traffic and generally produces numbers far above the number of unique
searchers that would reach a result via organic. The Moz tool takes this
into account and algorithmically (though not perfectly) adjusts for
that to give numbers closer to organic reality.
For
example, the term “cpu” is given an estimated volume of 74,000/mth
using the Keyword Planner. Per the Moz tool, we’d see it ranging from
between 30,000 and 70,000. Still a big number, but not the same — in
fact, if we averaged the Moz numbers, the estimate would be
50,000/month, or around 33 percent less.
Now
let’s make the scenario even worse (read: realistic). You might rank #1
at some point for your phrase, but it’s going to be a process. Let’s be
optimistic, however, and assume that a year from now you’re ranking #3
and hold that ranking for the following 365 days. Instead of dreaming
that every single person who runs that search (all 50,000/mth) are going
to get to your site, let’s assume some click-through rate averages.
Here’s what a WordStream study found for traffic by organic position:
So
we can see here that, in the number three position in organic
search, we were sitting at about 12.5 percent CTR. That’s 6,250 visitors
to your site. This is very, very different from the 74,000 expected when the email was sent.
Not
understanding what’s realistic in regard to the traffic to be gained
from a specific phrase when it’s ranking can lead to critical bad
decisions. If you feel you are going to get 74,000 visitors per month
for a phrase you’d actually get 6,250 for, your ROI calculations will be
off — and you’d likely focus far more energy and resources into it than
it warrants. Understanding the true value of a term or group of terms
is paramount to understanding how much attention to put into keyword
groups and whether they’re truly worth targeting at all.
Conclusion
A
lot of mistakes get made before campaigns even begin, and most of them
start with a lack of understanding of how keywords and rankings
function. No matter how successful the SEO campaign is in regard to the
rankings attained, if the principles and data that the efforts were
based on are incorrect or misunderstood, then the results can be as
catastrophic as if the campaign had simply failed.
Following
one guiding principle is all it takes to really avoid the biggest
issues: understand what you want, and understand a path to that. Wanting
more traffic in itself is not a goal; wanting more conversions and
revenue is. Focus on that, and when you’re communicating about strategy,
make sure that the discussion is on these business goals and not an
abstract idea that, if misinterpreted, could yield actions and efforts
that don’t actually support the business but do technically meet the
directives given.
Source: - http://searchengineland.com/3-logical-myths-rankings-can-destroy-business-274191
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