R.I.P. Search Engine Rankings?

With the advent of personalization and impending changes with the interface of search results, the notion of ranking seems to be on it's way out. In the past 3-4 years, most SEO consulting firms have been focusing on traffic and especially the past 2-3 years on conversions. Standard search engine rankings as a proxy to sales will become irrelevant, especially as other channels of search have emerged in popularity.

If you consider all the traffic opportunities from news search, blog search, social media as well as stand alone image, video and audio search, there's a lot of accountability left on the table when not considering all the possible sources of web site visitors. "Ranking Reports" only document web page positions on standard search engines. This logically leads to the need for better metrics and reporting overall, but that will have to wait for another post.

...the last year has seen the exodus of many hard-hitting search marketers from some of the more competitive arenas as they find that the effort required to maintain rankings isn't always worth the pay-off of those rankings.

Imagine, for a moment, that other marketing industries had set themselves up with similar expectations. That email marketers were considered unsuccessful if you didn't make the top ten list in terms of visitors to your site, that public relations professionals were a failure if you weren't one of the top ten stories of the year, that television commercials were a failure unless they resulted in more store visits than all but ten other companies in their industry. Starting to sound a little silly?

Of course it does! Marketing is about finding new and innovative ways to present a product so that it drives purchases. It's as simple as that. Commercial marketers work to capture an audiences' attention in a way that keeps a company top of mind when the need arises for their product. Direct mail advertisers seek to capture a potential customer's interest with a compelling enough offer to create a sale or at least an inquiry. In the world of traditional marketing, results are measured by ROI, not by some arbitrary "top ten" achievement.