All About Content

It’s pretty intuitive that higher rankings should result in greater website traffic. But in the world of SEO, lots of things are bandied about as facts, when actually they are often just one person’s opinion that kept getting repeated until enough people parroted it to make it sound authoritative. That’s why it’s always important to look for evidence that an assertion is true.

So do higher rankings result in more visitors? A picture is worth a thousand words, so check out these graphs tracking performance of one of the websites I manage, over a six month period:

The colored lines in the first graph illustrate the site’s ranking on Google for its most important keyword phrases. The second graph shows visits and page views. Looking at the dates, you can see that a change in rankings precedes a change in the number of visits - so you can assume causation, not just corrolation. So there - not that I was going out on a limb, but here’s evidence to back my claim that rankings do make a difference.

Additional clarification and answers to questions that ought to be asked:

Q: How did you create these graphs?

I use WebPosition Gold to track rankings. I output the data into an Excel file and then create a PivotTable. From the Pivot table I create a graph of the position my site held for a particular keyword phrase, using date as the x-axis and ranking as the y-axis. This will give you an easy-to-read look at upward or downward trends in positions.

If the analytics program you’re using on your site can’t generate something like my second graph for you automatically, just take the traffic data it does give you and plop it into an Excel file. Make another PivotTable to chart visits/page views over time and then superimpose the two for a clear view of how rankings affect your site.

Voilá, you’ve made your case that additional resources should be devoted to SEO.

Q. Isn’t it true that search engines penalize marketers who use WebPosition Gold?

WPG has a bad reputation among SEOs - with Google going so far as mentioning this product specifically as something that shouldn’t be used for optimization - but my use of WebPosition Gold is very conservative. I only use it to track positions, never to submit anything to a search engine.

I also don’t believe Google will “penalize” a site for any practices that can be faked by someone who isn’t in control of the site; otherwise everyone would be using this or similar software to get their competitors’ sites banned. By using a Google API key, I also avoid tripping Google’s CAPTCHA, which you’d otherwise do if you send too many automated queries in too a short a time. I’ve never run into any problems using WPG this way.

Q. Why did you only track Google positions?

The particular site’s rankings in Yahoo are fixed. They haven’t changed at all in 6 months, so I can factor them out when looking at at causal relationships. For simplicity’s sake, I didn’t include MSN Search because it doesn’t refer very much traffic to my site. You will want to monitor all three before you can determine whether to include them in your analysis.

If you are running PPC campaigns, you have to be able to filter ad-referred traffic out for this rankings-versus-traffic comparison to be at all meaningful.

Q. The keyword legend is illegible. What keywords are you tracking?

Can’t give away all my secrets now, can I? Anyway, does it really matter?

Q. Okay, but how did you decide what keywords to track?

I use a very unscientific calculus of two variables: which phrases are referring the most visitors to my site and which phrases, overall, Internet users are searching for the most. The former set of data you can get from your log files or analytics software. The second can be found using tools like WordTracker or Oveture’s keyword suggestion tool.

Q. What happened in late September that caused such a dramatic drop in your rankings?

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, but it happened before the Jagger Update came out. In fact, the site’s return to the top of the SERPs coincided with Jagger, so it doesn’t appear to have been any type of penalty caused by the update. (shrug)

I could speculate that it had something to do with Jagger raising the importance of links from “authority sites” - so those authority sites needed to be scrubbed before Jagger started. That’s why my site jumped around before the real search results reshuffle - Google needed to run the site through some special filters to confirm the site belonged among those sites whose links would be worth more. I could speculate. But I have absolutely no evidence for this - in fact, it’s not even an educated guess, I just made it up - so this entire paragraph is just a bunch of nonsense. Goes to show that you can’t believe much of what is written online about SEO.