@tjrobertson52

If you're running an SEO campaign, you're probably tracking keyword rankings, and this makes sense, right? To know how well the SEO campaign is doing, you need to know if you're moving up in the ranks. However, as someone who's been doing SEO for 16 years, I'm gonna tell you that rank tracking is one of the worst ways to track the performance of an SEO campaign.

I'll tell you why it's so unreliable. One exception to this rule, and then the best way to track the performance of your SEO campaign.

So there's two main reasons that rank tracking is unreliable. One is that you can only realistically track maybe a couple hundred keywords, but there's tens of thousands of search terms someone might use to get to your website. And the second is that you're chasing a moving target.

These keyword rankings change sometimes multiple times per day. They're affected by the location of the searcher and their personalisation.

That's why the only rank tracking that I use consistently is local rank tracking. This is using a local search grid like the one that White Spark offers to track rankings where the searcher actually stands when they're doing the search. Now this only applies to local businesses, but it can give you really actionable data about where you're ranking and where you're not and which competitors are out ranking you in those locations.

If you're not tracking your keyword ranking, how do you keep track of the performance of your SEO campaign traffic? What you really care about is how many people are finding your website through Google Search. And the best place to see that data is Google Search Console.

However, keep in mind you don't care about all traffic. For example, branded traffic. If someone is searching for your brand by name, you should rank at the top of Google no matter what you're doing on the SEO side.

So when you're trying to evaluate the performance of your SEO campaign, you should filter out branded traffic.

Also, it's important to understand that some traffic is just much more valuable than others. Typically, you would rather have one visit to a product or service page than 100 visits to some blog post. So that's why I evaluate the performance of every search campaign by tracking non branded traffic to our transactional pages.

Hey TJ, from the future here. Right after I recorded that video, Google put out a change that prevents rank trackers from seeing beyond the first 10 results. This is actually a huge problem for rank tracking software, and it makes them significantly less valuable.

So while rank tracking was already overrated, I think it's really in trouble now.