Mythbuster Series: Are My Rankings Reliable?
Search Results Are Complicated
It goes without saying that search engines are advancing in complexity every single day. As search engine technology evolves, it’s imperative that our understanding evolves with it. The biggest gap in understanding that I’ve seen recently and consistently is the amount of undue importance that the ranking report receives. To put it simply, Google has gone all-in on hyperlocal search results. Search engines simply aren’t behaving the same way they were a few weeks ago, a few months ago and are completely different to how they behaved a year ago. Search results have become incredibly dynamic, and they are absorbing more information on the fly than ever. The end result? Non-stop shifting search engine results pages that are constantly sending in more information than you intend in order to serve you up the results that they believe you need most. Let me be clear: Rankings are still vital to track for any successful campaign, and, in my opinion, represent about 45% of what a person should be looking into when gauging the health of their SEO program. The other 55%, the bigger piece of the pie, is how your organic traffic is progressing month over month, and year over year, but more on that at a later time. Let’s focus on the topic at hand.
Charlie Needham
09/01/2017
