There’s a tendency in the SEO world to track and obsess over every metric available, but it’s not always necessary. You could be wasting a lot of time giving too much meaning to some complex data; time that could be well spent by focusing on what matters most. For instance, your Conversion rate is more important than the Number of visitors you receive in a day.
If you have just recently created your own site and you find yourself struggling with some SEO metrics, it may be time to find out first which parts are worth your time so you can increase your productivity. On the other hand, the following 5 metrics are ones you might want to stop obsessing over.
Top 30 SERP rankings
Many webmasters – using some advice they stumbled upon on the internet – believe that their site is successful enough if it appears a good number of times among the top 30 rankings of search engines for their target keywords. However, there’s a major flaw when you’re looking at the top 30, because most search engine users hardly ever go beyond the first page.
Why not focus on the top 10? Even if your site appears numerously in the second or third pages of the SERPs, it won’t matter that much. The only way to get the kind of exposure you want is by getting on the first page.
Social media “votes”
While social signals are now a way for search engines to gauge your site’s relative popularity, obsessing over the numbers of +1s, re-tweets of “likes”isn’t going to help you much. Your primary goal should be to create quality, shareable content. Maybe in this way you’ll also be hoping to attract higher authority shares, rather than just looking at the number of shares you get.
Your number of Facebook “likes” definitely isn’t more important than the conversion rate of you social media referrals. Of course, you must keep track of the social shares for your content to see if you’re falling off the radar, but slight variations in the numbers need not cause you sleepless nights.
Toolbar PageRank
Matt Cutts of Google dismissed the toolbar PageRank score popular with many webmasters as largely “irrelevant”. While Google does run algorithms to determine how much authority web pages are to be assigned, the scores are revealed to the public just a few times a year, meaning that what you’re seeing now could be way outdated.
The metrics these SEO toolbars give can indeed be useful for monitoring your web pages periodically, as any major decrease would alert you that Google has penalized your content, while a significant increase will inform you that you’re on the right path. However, this data isn’t as relevant or as accurate as most site owners think it is.
Number of daily visits
We all know that website traffic is important, but tracking the number of visits on an hourly or daily basis won’t help much. What’s important, more than the visits, is how much your website converts.
For instance, you could be receiving 1,000 visitors a day, but how many of those are you turning into customers or subscribers? Without conversion optimization, most of your efforts in attracting visitors are going to waste because increased traffic doesn’t always guarantee a significant rise in revenue.
It would be better to find out the optimal conversion times, how the conversions occur and how best to improve them. And only then can you comfortably start looking at the traffic numbers.
Social clout
With the emergence of social metrics sites such as Klout, too many social individuals are trying too hard to increase their social influence score. But it’s really a waste of time.
You might have realized by now that a higher Klout score is nothing more than a popularity contest. There’s little doubt that social influence will bear more weight in the future, but as of now, focusing on your business, value creation and conversion optimization should remain your priorities.
