SEO in Brief: Is Ranking Still Important?

Q: After the Google Panda and Penguin updates my rankings decreased. I am afraid that this Hummingbird algorithm will bring nothing good too. Isn’t it better to forget about rankings and concentrate on social media?

First of all, remember that rankings don’t matter so much as conversions. You get conversions when your site receives targeted traffic. Below you can see the main sources that can bring traffic to a website.

SEO, social media and referring links are the traffic sources that are (relatively) free for you. Let’s stop on SEO and rankings. The higher the rankings you have for the keywords that people search with, the more traffic you will receive that converts well.

Today Google uses Universal search that blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. This means you should be present in all these vertical search results to get higher visibility and receive more targeted traffic that will convert at a higher rate into customers. You should check rankings regularly to know how you are doing in the Universal Search results and tweak your pages to get into the maxium number of positions in each type of result.

The Web CEO Rank Checker helps you monitor your positions across  the Universal Google search results (organic results + paid results + vertical results you’ve chosen) or across the vertical search results only (e.g. Google Places, Images, etc.).  The Rank Checker “Google search results” settings help you configure ranking reports to provide maximum information value and for your convenience.

You should also check the visits these positions bring. This data is vital for improving your conversions. If you connect your Google Analytics with your WebCEO account, go to the Rank Checker Settings, click on ‘Display’ and check ‘Visits brought by search engines’. Now you’ll be able to analyze what positions bring you prospects and how you can improve your conversions.

To summarize, I want to admit that it is too early to say we don’t need organic rankings anymore. Organic search will still bring you a lot of visitors who will convert into your customers.