Ranking is Not a Metric to Grow Your Business
The ultimate goal of a good search engine optimization campaign is to help you grow your business. There are some misconceptions associated with this, and perhaps one of the biggest is concerning “page rank”. The theory is that if you improve your website’s Page Rank score, then you will automatically perform better in the search engines, increase traffic, and then the results will follow.
However, the situation is a lot more complex than that, and it isn’t a simple matter of boosting your page’s rank, or even traffic, in order to increase your business. Ultimately, your website needs to attract the right kinds of visitors, and SEO is simply a tool that you can use to help you do that.
Google Doesn’t Let You View Page Rank
Google used to let you see what your website’s Page Rank score was via the Google Toolbar. However, in 2016, Google got rid of that functionality. This shows that Google doesn’t value Page Rank the way that it used to, and it also shows that they don’t want us to worry about it. Sure, we can use Google Search Console to determine the average of where our website shows up for certain keywords in a search, but we are not able to see the Page Rank.
What does this mean? Well, it shows that Google doesn’t want us to worry about it. Back in the early days of SEO, when this information was available to us, people took advantage and it created a lot of useless search results. Google wants the search results to be useful to its users, and by showing us the data, they were creating situations where people tried to artificially force their website to rank using shady practices. At the time, the practices weren’t considered shady, so even ethical digital marketers were using the strategies. Those days are gone, and in fact, they warn against these practices in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Focus on Getting Quality Traffic
The number one intent of SEO these days is to create a program that best connects your ideal audience with your website, as well as to help create a great user experience for your customers. Here are some strategies that can help this occur:
- Content. The content on your website should be written with the intent of delivering your audience helpful information. If the content achieves this objective, it will automatically do well in the search engines. In other words, put your customers first, and your website will perform better organically anyway.
- Keywords. These should be used very sparingly, if at all, and it is better to forget about them rather than overdo it. Keyword stuffing, for example, is a practice that Google frowns on, and most website visitors are sophisticated enough to know when a piece of content is littered with keywords. If your content is well written, keywords will be automatically woven in without you eve thinking about it. This is much better for your audience.
As you can see, worrying about page rank won’t help you grow your business. Instead, create a great website that is written to attract the right audience, and trust in the process.
Categorized in: SEO
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