You can’t blame website owners for becoming obsessed with their search engine rankings because they have been told high rankings will generate sales. This is partially true but it doesn’t present the whole picture of attracting traffic and converting that traffic into buyers. Even though you may receive first page rankings for a specific keyword it doesn’t mean that ranking converts into a sale.
Top 7 reasons not to obsess over your search engine rankings
1. Too many competitors
If you’re selling in a very popular market you probably have millions of competing websites. Check this out by entering your main keyword in the Google search box and see how many results you receive. Another method of checking out your competitors is to see how many back links their website has. If they have thousands of back links it may not be worth investing time and money trying to out rank them.
2. Low value keywords
Not all keywords are created equal. Even though you may get high rankings for a specific keyword it may not generate any sales. This may be due to people finding free information. The keyword may have no commercial value.
3. Poor landing page design
Even if you drive a lot traffic to your landing page if it’s poorly designed your visitors may leave right away. For instance the page may contain too many distractions (multiple links, lots of graphics), take too long to load or be too cluttered to read.
4. Poorly written web copy
Your landing page won’t convert visitors into buyers if your web copy doesn’t deliver a clear message. Your headline must draw visitors into the content and your content must deliver what the headline promises. Why pay a company to drive 1000s of visitors to your site if you are only able to convert a few of them? It would be more beneficial to have less visitors and improve your conversion rate.
5. High bounce rate
Search engines know how long someone remains on your site. This data is important to them because if too many people “bounce” off your site and go elsewhere this indicates your site did not meet their expectations. This means even if your landing page is well optimized it will be difficult to receive high rankings.
6. Ineffective meta tags
The title and description meta-tags make a big difference in obtaining high rankings and attracting visitors. Some website owners stuff as many keywords as possible into their title meta-tag thinking this will propel their site to the top of the search engines. The problem is that a keyword-stuffed title makes no sense to the reader and therefore will not click on it to visit your website.
Under the title tag in the search engines is the description (description meta-tag) of the web page. If it doesn’t captivate your visitor they won’t be inspired to visit your site even if it is ranked well.
7. No testing
Without testing different headlines, web copy etc. you won’t know what factors will improve your conversion rates. For example rewriting your headline may result in a higher conversion rate for your web page.
Search engine rankings will always play a significant role in getting traffic, however just because a keyword is ranking well it doesn’t mean your visitors will purchase your product or service. That is why you shouldn’t obsess over your rankings.
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