Is this the end of rank tracking?
The well known SEO software provider raven tools recently announced that they will now longer provide rank tracking services. Although this is disheartening to me personally, since I use this service, I do believe it is yet another sign of things to come.
Broad ranking indicators will become less and less important as search engines like Google work towards providing more focused and personalized results. The integration of Geo-targeted and social media influenced search results are becoming a significant factor. In my own , somewhat limited, experiments I am seeing a distinct correlation between geography and search results. As well as the social factors including social signals, and friend recommendations.
This is not new news….
But it does raise a question related to the validity of rank tracking in the future. At this point I am pretty sure it wont matter at all. The real answer to “ranking” will be to understand your target audiences problem and then provide quality content around the related discussion points and potential solutions. Even so, there are things you can do to improve your results… despite not being able to track them 100%.
Here are ideas that may help improve your search results traffic:
- Regular blogging – relevant and frequent content
- Social sharing – “likes”, bookmarks and G+’s all matter
- Email marketing – using an email list to promote your content is critical
- Positive press – press releases and “guest posting” on other blogs bring more visitors
- Traffic & time on site – Having good content that keeps people engaged is important. Many believe that Google “knows” if visitors like what you are offering.
Of all the things you can do, creating social media interaction seems to have the largest impact. In many ways it addresses all 5 topics. As such, I have developed an “in-house” plugin for wordpress that is designed to help with this factor. Although not available to the public, I am looking for others to test it’s effectiveness. Just leave a comment if your interested and I will send you a download link and private license key.
