Keyword Tracking A Worthless Metric

July 25, 2022

If you have worked in SEO for longer than two days, it is evident that clients care about where they rank for a term or set of terms in Google or Bing. As an SEO services provider, you must show your client where they rank for keywords. Right?

Are you losing time explaining to a client why they are not ranking? Are you creating anxiety between yourself and your clients? You most certainly are, as your rankings are not stagnant.

Keyword tracking is simply unreliable to measure. In my experience, every single tool I’ve used has led to the same conclusion. A tool crawls Google (or Bing) and checks for a website’s placement for a set of terms. Ideally, this sounds straightforward. It’s not. Both you and your client are missing the bigger picture, which could be costing you money, whether an opportunity or spending.

A Website Page Under Keyword Tracking With Magnifying Glass.

Dependability of your Keyword Tracking Tool

One can and should never depend on a keyword tracking tool. They are accurate until they are not. Google makes too many changes and updates to the search engine results pages for the tracking tools to keep up. I have never had a keyword tracking tool perform with the precision that I could rely on. Furthermore, rankings fluctuate a lot and looking at a set of terms also limits success.

We have a client in a big competitive industry primarily focused on one keyword (when we started working together). We got the top ranking for their term nationally. However, whenever the client dropped a few spots (ranking fluctuation), they would rush to conclusions and insist on making drastic changes. This is not the best decision, and directing their attention to the bigger picture is the winning move. In one of our meetings with all the team players, our ranking tool showed us in 4th position. I asked everyone in the meeting to perform a Google search for that term, and we were in 1st position across the board. Fun Zoom meeting that was.

Between Google making 500 updates a month, competitors and natural fluctuations, what a keyword tool actually does is shoot your foot before a race. On our mark, get set. Bang!

Too Many Keywords Not Enough Worth

When you track a broad term with lots of searches or focus on a small set of highly competitive terms, you miss a world of less competitive topics that can drive your (or your client’s) business. Significant broad terms are excellent; however, they are much more competitive and not always as rewarding as a less broad search with more apparent intent. Instead, I would rank a client for 1,000 terms that each has a search of 10 rather than 1,000 hits to a page from one term. Usually, the less broad searches have more intent behind them. Besides, why would anyone want to put all the eggs in one basket?

Search Engines Give Us Better Data

Google and Bing have webmaster tools that provide valuable data, including keyword tracking. We get a mix of all sorts of terms and phrases. Different people find our website from different content published, which is a far superior measurement strategy. Instead of arguing with your client or boss about one term not ranking, you can focus on a world of opportunities that will drive more results.

For Jumbolicious Technologies clients, we target a wide range of less broad terms. Our focus is on creating unique pages to serve users directly from Google. These less broad terms typically convert better since they are more competitive.