Are #1 Rankings Overrated?

INTRO:
It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: What a strong intro that was. You sounded like a news anchor.

MICHAEL: In breaking news, we're here to talk SEO. Imagine. No, let's not go down that path. Imagine what? No, come on. Well, would Peter Overton like talking SEO? Probably not.

ARTHUR: So tell me about your link building. I think he's got his, he doesn't sound like that first and foremost. And he's got his hands tied with real news.

MICHAEL: So you're saying the world of SEO is not newsworthy?

ARTHUR: Oh, not six o'clock nationwide news maybe, but it's definitely newsworthy. I mean, we have this podcast, right?

MICHAEL: Big news just happened actually in the SEO world. Semrush, S-E-M-R-U-S-H? Yes. Semrush acquired Search Engine Land. Did you know that? Wow. No. They bought it. So now Semrush bought Backlinko.com, Traffic Think Tank. search engine land, SMX conference festival. What's the lineup? So they're buying all of these, they're buying all of these like media assets and then using it to funnel customers into SEMrush. It's pretty smart.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: If you've got the money for it. Well, yeah, they're a public company now.

ARTHUR: I mean, couldn't they just run ads on those media sites a bit cheaper than buying them?

MICHAEL: Yeah. But like that. So with Backlinko, they've gone in and just changed all mentions of Ahrefs to SEMrush pretty much. Yeah. So there's a lot of trust on those sites where people land on it.

ARTHUR: No, I completely understand.

MICHAEL: Anyway, that's not what we're talking about today, is it?

ARTHUR: No. What are we talking? Today we're talking about our rankings overrated.

MICHAEL: Number one rankings. Is ranking number one overrated?

ARTHUR: Well, no, the actual episode title is titled is our rankings.

SPEAKER_00: Don't throw me off like this.

ARTHUR: You know, I get thrown off. I can't see the screen probably because there's mics in my way. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So it is our rankings overrated, but more specifically position one top is ranking number one overrated. We're going to dive into that today. Let's argue. I've always wanted to say that on a podcast.

ARTHUR: Let's see if he's listening. Although I highly doubt it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, whatever it is in the chat that you do.

ARTHUR: We threw a spanner in the works here because I thought we were talking about our rankings overall overrated, not just number one, but I'll, you know, I'll press on.

MICHAEL: I'm a professional. How's that throwing a spanner? If ranking, if you don't have rankings whatsoever, I'm a professional.

ARTHUR: I know I'll move forward. Let's just, just the show must go on.

MICHAEL: Yes. So rankings aren't overrated because you need rankings. If you don't have rankings, you just have a website. It's like opening up a shop in the Outback. You got no customers, no foot traffic. So rankings aren't overrated, but ranking, because I don't know if you've noticed, but some clients can obsess over ranking number one.

ARTHUR: I have noticed. I have worked with my fair share of clients that have been obsessed with rankings.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And it's our contention, we're going to argue That ranking number one is a bit overrated now. I'm going to caveat that by saying, of course, ranking number one's good, but it's not the be-all and end-all. And there's plenty of other things. We've got 12 points here that we want to touch on that go into the cake. They're the ingredients of the ranking number one, potentially being overrated cake that we're making here. Baker's dozen. Baker's dozen. Well, no, we've got 12. We've got a line in length, measly 12. So let's start here. The first one, conversion trumps position. What do you think about that?

ARTHUR: Well, I think, yeah, a hundred percent. So if you have a page that is ranking high, but doesn't convert well compared to a page that ranks a little bit lower that converts better, obviously the page that converts better is going to be better. Right? So that's going to be a more valuable page to your website, your business. So I guess in that argument, it's saying that conversion is probably going to be important, more important than ranking first a lot of the time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like if you rank first for a keyword and your site's garbage. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Like that traffic is going to bounce. Yeah. Probably lose that number one ranking as a result.

ARTHUR: Well, true. Yeah. We've worked with a lot of businesses that had horrible websites, um, that didn't convert. I guess a lot of people focus, I guess on ranking and not conversions in a roundabout way, I guess.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And we even, we have clients that will come on an SEO engagement and we get them ranking, maybe not number one for every keyword, but for some, and then, you know, good traffic coming through. If you are obsessed with ranking number one for, I want to rank number one for credit card or something big like that, you would need to put all of your resource and effort into that. But we have some clients where after a period of time, their SEO engagement shifts for a little while into a CRO engagement where rather than trying to get more rankings or number one rankings, we try to maximize the traffic that we have by improving conversion rates.

ARTHUR: And that makes a bigger difference a lot of the time. In the sense that, for example, like if we're able to improve the conversion rate, say from like 1% to 1.4% and they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue online already, they're gonna see a bigger increase in revenue by doing that than potentially jumping from position five to position four. Because the click-through rate isn't gonna change that drastically.

MICHAEL: It's like having a bucket, a leaky bucket. You can pump heaps more and more water into it and get lots of people pumping more and more water into it to try and fill it up. Or you can fix the leaks and have less effort needed to fill it up.

ARTHUR: 100%. It's like a two-pronged approach. You want to do both. Obviously, you want more traffic to the site, but you want to maximize whatever traffic you have. We often do it out of the SEO routine. If there's quick wins, that's something that we knock out. What's the saying there? Knock it on the head straight away. But if we notice that we can probably improve the conversion rate, we'll do that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. Well, so conversion trumps position. A lower ranked page that converts better will be more valuable than a top ranked page with poor conversion rates. So that's the first point. The second one is long tail keywords. a pretty good little playground because you know, you might be. We, we spoke about this on the plumbers episode. You might be trying to rank for plumber Sydney, going all in on that super competitive, tons of ads on it, heaps of ads above the fold competitors plowing money into links and they all want that. But you're out there in Beecroft going for block drain plumber Beecroft. And you're doing that not just in Beecroft, but in Pennant Hills, Castle Hill, West Pennant Hills, Epping. So on and so forth. And, um, you get in traffic and you don't necessarily have to rank number one for these big juicy head turns because collectively these long tails, they bring in really targeted traffic.

ARTHUR: But you still got to rank first for them.

MICHAEL: No, you rank in the top three. Okay. Rank in the top three. And but like chasing number one.

ARTHUR: Yes. No, I know what you're trying to say. I completely agree.

MICHAEL: If we're coming back to like clients obsessing over ranking number one for a big juicy head turn.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And we could say, well, look, we're going for these long tail keywords here and your traffic's increasing and these leads are turning into customers. Yeah. That's a net benefit for you rather than just ranking for this big head turn. A hundred percent.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Drive. A lot of people have like, not so much pride, but it's like a vanity thing as well, because they want to be number one. So they don't want to be like a, I don't know, let's just say a plumber, for example. They want to be number one plumber in Sydney. So they won't care about, I guess they will care, but I mean, they just want that as a vanity thing in a way.

MICHAEL: It's an easy metric as well. Yeah. This is a big keyword in my space. If I'm improving for that, if I'm number one for that, I've got good SEO.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: I totally understand that argument.

ARTHUR: Me too. Me too. But I mean, like from the vanity perspective, it's just like, you know, they could have a month where their traffic and, um, leads go up 20%, right. But they might drop to position two for plumber Sydney. Um, and despite the increase in traffic and leads, it's almost like, you know, a focus point there. Well, why, why have I dropped? Like, well, you've dropped because rankings fluctuate, but also what about the 20% increase in leads that you had? It's almost like overshadowed by that drop. Which happens all the time.

MICHAEL: The mindset we're talking about here. Rankings can be a little bit overrated in that regard, because in my business, I'm going to take 20% increase in leads as opposed to ranking number one for arbitrary keyword. Yep. Let's tie that into this point here, ranking volatility, because it's a little bit further in our list, but it's a nice segue there. Thank you. Yeah, good work. Obsessing over daily rankings can lead to knee-jerk reactions.

ARTHUR: Yes, yeah. We've worked in niches where rankings can change, you know, four or five times a day. And rankings will change depending on personalization, whether you're logged in, where you are, whether you're in Western Sydney or Sydney or, you know. So I guess a lot of people need to understand that there is volatility, you know, rankings fluctuate. Just because you've dropped from position one to position three, you might be in position two the next day, then you might be back in position one. Yeah. And the specific industries like the florist industry that we worked in, we see a super volatile. So I guess, yeah, going back to your comment on knee-jerk reactions, I guess just understanding that it happens, the Google dance happens. As long as you're not dropping further and you're consistently moving back and trying to solidify a position one spot, it's just a part of Google.

MICHAEL: And an example of a knee jerk reaction is another point we have here, which is focusing on one keyword can look suspicious to Google. So let's say you drop for one keyword and they're like, get me back into number one, you know, this month. You might make all of your link building focus on that. All of your anchor text in your links is focused on that keyword. You're doing work on the site. And if there's too much of that, it can be unnatural. And, you know, algorithmic penalties like Penguin and the like in the past looked at that sort of stuff. These days it's all over the place what they're looking at. But it stands to reason that if you do focus too much on one keyword in anchor text and link building all to an internal page with that keyword and not really doing anything else to your site. That's it. It can hurt you. So this is where a knee jerk reaction to wanting to chase a particular keyword can hurt your site rather than help it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Agree.

MICHAEL: You better serve building links to all of your pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You still want to focus on it, but diversify. So when it does drop off for a little bit, it's not be all end all. Keep calm and carry on. That's it. And I think you've got to understand as well, a lot of people will be optimizing for that one keyword. So that's why it's fluctuating so frequently. It's because they're all doing link building. They're all testing different things. They're all updating the copy, using different tools. So it's constantly going to be changing. Diversify, focus on other pages as well. So you're not super stressed if that one drops off a little bit for a little bit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Right. Here's another one. Cost effectiveness. We reckon. So if you're, if you're ranking, you know, position two, three, four, five for multiple keywords, is that better than plowing money into ranking number one for like the juiciest biggest head term?

ARTHUR: For sure, I think so. Because a lot of the time, if you're trying to rank for that juicy big term, it's going to cost you a lot more. It's going to be a lot more competitive. And it could be an uphill battle sometimes, depending on who your competitors are. So you're better off, again, diversifying and trying to focus on keywords that are going to be easier to push up, getting them to position three, position two, and trying to get traffic that way. If you can do all of it, great. You know, if you can target your head term and those, you know, I guess secondary keywords, fantastic. But I think, yeah, it definitely is a good strategy if you can't compete with the big guys in the main head terms.

MICHAEL: And I would say if you have three or four different keywords ranking there or thereabouts, In reality, you have a lot of keywords ranking, because there's all variants of it. So you have more nets in the sea, as I always like to say.

ARTHUR: I guess it depends, again, on the search volume. So if your main keyword has 10,000 searches and your four other keywords or five other keywords have 80 searches, then you're never going to get traffic that way. So as long as they've got substantial search volume, then it's a good way to do it.

MICHAEL: And this one, another great segue, It's almost like we thought it out a bit beforehand. Another great segue is, um, diminishing returns because the effort required to go from two to one, is it worth the marginal traffic increase? Like. The click-through rate, you could sometimes find that if you're ranking in the second spot, your click-through rate's higher than first. If your meta descriptions are good, if you have a little emoji action going on there, a little green tick in your description.

ARTHUR: I don't see that that often anymore.

MICHAEL: No, I don't either. But you know what I'm saying. If your description is good enough that it's encouraging more clicks, then you might find that ranking in second or third spot is going to drive more traffic than first spot. But even if you're not killing it with your click-through rate game, just ranking second or third is pretty good for the traffic. It might not be worth the cost and effort to push into that top spot. Also, when we take into account the fact that rankings sort of fluctuate or move around anyway, So it's like, at a certain point, it's better to move laterally to other keywords. For sure. Rather than obsessing over ranking number one for your glory term.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Look, I don't, the click-through rate between position one and two isn't that different anymore.

MICHAEL: Yeah, because this is another point we have here, like SERP features, right?

ARTHUR: Like position one is always… It's all kind of melding together, isn't it?

MICHAEL: It's just a beautiful… It's like it's all part of one topic. Beautiful prep, like just fantastic. really showing that, um, we've done a hundred and something episodes now. Wow. Just floors. Anyway. So now I've got cert features. Ah, cert features. So position one, it's not always a top spot because there's featured snippets and ads and all the other junk that Google squeezes in there.

ARTHUR: Depending on what the keyword is.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So in some cases, let's say you're obsessing over being number one for whatever. Dog Washing Sydney. But for some reason Dog Washing Sydney has four ads and it has a shopping carousel and it has like people also ask questions, has a local pack. And you're obsessing over this keyword where you are like four scrolls down the page before you get to it. Whereas there's this beautiful fertile ground of dog grooming where there's not that stuff. But you're obsessed with ranking number one for dog washing. You're shooting yourself in the foot. So you need to take into account, you need to get the lay of the land in your niche.

ARTHUR: The lay of the land.

MICHAEL: Put the lay of the land and go for the keywords most likely again to drive quality traffic and then convert it on your website with great conversion design principles.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I'd be very curious to see what the conversion rate is. Oh, sorry, the click-through rate is for, you know, organic listings that do have all of that. I'm sure there's plenty of studies that I can find in a couple of seconds. But, you know, the listings that you have to scroll through for ads, sometimes even like a shopping feed to the right, then you got your local pack. Like you said, the people also ask all questions.

MICHAEL: Now they're going to start shoving in AI overviews.

ARTHUR: That's like, that's more than four scrolls. Maybe, maybe not more, but that's like a lot of scrolling.

MICHAEL: Yep. Google's a mess in many searches. Did you see the dude that was in charge of Google search and ads and a couple of other products has been like punted into he's now like chief He's a technologist. He's chief technologist, not chief technical officer, chief technologist. It's like they've put him out to the side so that they can bring someone else in, hopefully to try and fix the state of their search results at the moment. You know, they're getting just absolute hate from all angles about how much it's declined over the last couple of years. Not just from SEO people, but from like- Everyone, general public.

ARTHUR: General people that just notice how bad it is. But it's going to get worse once they start doing more AI. Yeah. I don't like that. I like being able to, we've already talked about this, but I like being able to see results. Like I like being able to choose. Yeah. I like choice. You know what I mean? A hundred percent. And I don't want just like with chat GPT, when you ask it a question, here's the answer. That's great. But not when I'm searching for like a service, I'm searching for a service. I want to see options and I want to make the decision myself. Yes.

MICHAEL: Google's already shown, you can't really trust them to be the one that gives you the be all end all answer to anything.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess I guarantee that whoever they show us will be the one who's bidding the most a lot of the time. And it's just going to become that. It's just going to become super focused on who can outbid who. And that's who it's going to recommend. If you're asking like, what, what's the best, what plumber should I use, for example. Some people might like that. Some people are lazy. Some people prefer it, but.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Some people do prefer it.

ARTHUR: Some people just like being told, I can't be bothered searching, going through reviews. I just trust Google because it's going to tell me the most trustworthy answer. But then there's people like me who would love to have a look and see, let's look at their profiles. Let's have a look at their reviews. Let's have a look at their site and make a decision. So yeah, it's only going to get worse before it gets better or if it even gets better.

MICHAEL: Yeah, well see the guy that they've replaced this guy with is like another version of him. So, not holding my breath.

ARTHUR: They're still going to push forward with it. It's not like they're going to do a 180 and go back to the old ways.

MICHAEL: You never know. If it doesn't make them money and people don't like it and don't engage with it, they'll give up on it. Yeah. But like the AI overviews kind of thing, like if they're seeing like signals, people trying to get away from it or like do a new search because of it, which they've, they've created products and got rid of them very quickly, many, many times over the years. That's very true. So I'm holding out hope because I hate AI overviews. Yeah. I am. refer to it as a new version of the Microsoft Word paperclip. Remember that paperclip? Yeah. That would pop up and give you little pointers. Just be annoying, get in the way. Yeah. That's kind of what AI overviews is like a modern day version of that. Pretty much. You're trying to search something and then you have to watch it type out like a mishmash of generic slop. Anyway, that wasn't what we were talking about. We're talking about rankings overrated. I think the only other really passionate about paperclip and slop. Sorry about that guys. Let's get back to the topic at hand. Yes. We only have one couple of two more points here. Local SEO nuances in local searches factors like proximity. outweigh traditional ranking factors in some cases. So it's kind of what always happens with people in Google ads too, like clients will be like, I've searched, can't see my ad. And it's because you're searching Google, Google sees that you've searched it, haven't engaged with the ad and it stops showing you the ad. Got to use the ad preview tool, don't you? That's what we always say to our clients. In the SEO world, if they're in Ballarat and they're searching for their plumbing business while they're on holidays in Ballarat, they're going to see different results. Yep. So being obsessed about being number one for a certain thing might not even be a factor because all their customers are in Bondi and they're in Ballarat. Yep. So, um, I guess what we're saying here is that like having an over emphasis on rankings. is just the wrong way to go about it because there's so many factors to it. And the other thing it can do is to track from maybe other channels. Like let's say someone's wanting to plow all their effort into ranking number one for a keyword, but they haven't even touched on running some Google ads yet. Yeah. There's an opportunity cost there of going hard to rank number one for a keyword, when you could be plowing a bit of that into Google Ads. Or CRO. CRO, yep. Well, we're big on that.

ARTHUR: It's amazing. A lot of people that have an appetite for it, but a lot of people that probably just don't get it. And a lot of the time, there's just so many things you can improve on a site. A lot of the time the site's doing a lot of things right and you actually have to do a proper audit and start looking at session recordings and click maps and all that stuff. But when you identify issues with the site and improve conversion rate, it's like more rewarding than… It's fun.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I've just come up with a great analogy.

ARTHUR: Yeah, go on.

MICHAEL: There's a Vietnamese roll place near us, near our office. Yes, I know. There's multiple Vietnamese roll places, right? So they're the multiple websites and the traffic is all of us walking around in the street looking for lunch. And we've been into a couple of the Vietnamese roll places. Not the best, you know, just a standard ordering process. You sort of order, they disappear out the back, come back with it. But then the one that's really optimized have like a production line of people and they make the bread in house and then they put the food together in front of you and then they have a different person that you pay and it's a well optimized process. So they're getting a lot more out of the same traffic that's out there. Their website is converting better. Yep. And that's what CRO is. It's just optimizing your website and how humans interact with it. And the human aspect of all that traffic, because traffic is, you know, that's what SEO does, but there are people at the end of the day ending up on your site.

ARTHUR: I mean, the Vietnamese rolls are also better, which makes a big difference.

MICHAEL: They're very well priced. They're tasty. Yeah. Good portion sizes and a flawless ordering process. Yep.

ARTHUR: No, I agree. That's why there's always a big line out the door. Yep.

MICHAEL: So shout out to Excel roll paramount.

ARTHUR: If you're listening, check it out. It's like a soup Nazi. Um, yeah. Friendly though. Friendly, but it's the same process. You line up, what do you want water? Go move along. Shuffle across pay. Off you go. And then you open up your bag and you like Jimbo. What does he say? I don't know. Something like that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Lobster bisque. Yep. Anyway, that's it. We've gone off track again.

ARTHUR: Sometimes it's fun to have a bit of conversation.

MICHAEL: You like having a chat with me?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. It makes it more real, doesn't it? Well, it's definitely always real.

MICHAEL: It's always real, but I feel like- We've officially voted the most real SEO podcast.

ARTHUR: Oh, really? The most read and most trusted?

MICHAEL: Yeah. The world's. The world's. It is good to have a little chat about SEO and these things and go off course every so often. Maybe we can start another podcast. Maybe we can start an SEO stream. What's your idea? Let us know. Would you like that? No. Watching Arthur doing SEO streaming on kick or Twitch or something. No one would ever watch an SEO stream.

ARTHUR: You never know. I know. I'm pretty confident that someone would, but probably not worth the time or effort. I'm nowhere near good looking enough to be able to attract viewers.

MICHAEL: But you're, you know what? You can get really excited and amped up and be like engaging.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I could be, but I still don't think you get a lot of people. Unfortunately. Let us know though.

MICHAEL: Go to theseoshow.co, send us a message. Should Arthur start a live stream SEO channel on Kick? But until then, think about rankings. You don't have to be number one. As long as your traffic's growing, your leads are growing, you're getting customers, that's a good news story. There could be an opportunity cost if you focus too much on number ones. So hopefully this episode helped frame your thinking. Hey, now, before we finish as well, bad SEO agencies, they're going to try and hide behind some of this stuff. So you got to be wary of that because there is a flip side to it all. What do you mean? Well, I'm like, if I'm saying here, you don't have to be number one, you know, it's just like your visibility going up is good and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's true. Yeah, it is true. But like a dodgy agency, that's like not getting results could just say, well, listen, you know, it takes time and blah, blah, blah.

ARTHUR: Well, of course, I guess the caveat here is you still need to be getting results. Like you can't just be getting no leads, no traffic. And then them telling you number one's not important. That's true. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So you obviously like if you're. If you're a business that's been around for a while, and you're getting traffic already, and you're getting leads, and you've seen improvement in leads, like a significant improvement in leads, and your rankings go down, or a ranking goes down, this is where this applies. But if you're just not getting any results, period, then obviously you've got bigger problems to worry about than one position, or one keyword.

MICHAEL: So that's it. I thought I'd touch on that before we finish things off. Because I do know that the old SEO world, they can be full of takes time. Well, it's true.

ARTHUR: We always bang on about that because it does take time. Exactly.

MICHAEL: So like if you could be taken for a ride, potentially, but someone saying number one keywords don't matter. But the baseline expectation is that you are getting leads, traffic, customers from SEO. That's growing. Maybe the number one keyword for your glory keyword doesn't matter, but if you've got nothing, then the SEO agency shouldn't be saying to you that rankings are overrated because they're the be all end all if you don't have any. Correct. All right. Glad we clarified that. We've got to clarify that. That's about it for this episode. Unless there's anything else you randomly want to say.

ARTHUR: No, I just like how you just kind of like almost jumped into that.

MICHAEL: Just when I thought I was out. Just when I thought I was out.

ARTHUR: By the way, you need to make sure you actually are getting some sort of results. Now, by the way, you should be doing SEO. If you're not getting good results, you can always hit us up at theseoshow.co forward slash, I don't know.

MICHAEL: You're really bad at that, aren't you? Just theseoshow.co. Okay. Then they can figure it out. Cool. Forward slash something or other. Yeah. All right, let's wrap this one up. Probably should have happened a couple of minutes ago. My bad. We'll do better next week. Happy SEOing. Happy SEOing.

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