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Totally agree. Ranking reports are for fun. Analytics are for profit.

Posted by: Andrew Shotland on August 12, 2008

yeah i agree on this point some ppl focus really hard on the serp and forgot what the have been doing on there sites but for sure serp good result will send more hits and more hits = more visitors and sell

Posted by: syria on August 12, 2008

In my opinion, statistics are very very important.. Numbers gives things.:!

Posted by: mad on August 14, 2008

SERPs are sometimes nice additional information to see where you're ranking in case you FINALLY got google analytics (or another analytics tool) to your site after you've been pulling rankings for a while. It's hard to know how the traffic was doing a year ago and how it's doing now and if your product is seasonal you can't judge your traffic from the previous month.

Granted there are other things you can analyze but generally speaking, analytics helps us only so much if we haven't had it implemented for more than a years time.

Posted by: Colleen on August 15, 2008

This is definitely an interesting topic. We just had a meeting about positioning reports here at our office.

We likely are going to modify our current process. Possibly hand-checking a handful of priority phrases. Then start incorporating other stats like PageRank, Compete numbers and numbers from Google Webmaster Central.

This actually could be a good transition for the SEO community.

Thanks all for writing!
Sage

Posted by: Sage Lewis on August 15, 2008

Love the video blog... informative and entertaining!

How about Google gives the people what they want and expands their Google Webmaster Tools ranking report? Only once per week?! How about once per day? How about we get to pick the phrases?

Posted by: Erik Cunningham on August 15, 2008

Hi Erik,

Expanding Webmaster Tools would pretty much solve this entire issue. They already give us a taste of this info. Building it out a bit would be awesome.

Thanks for writing!
Sage

Posted by: Sage Lewis on August 17, 2008