Optimize Your Search Results for Clicks, Not Just Rank

Ask yourself a seemingly obvious question: What is the purpose of Search Engine Optimization?  The gut reaction of most people is that SEO is supposed to make your company’s website rank as high up in search results as possible.  But is that really what companies are after, or is that just a vanity metric distracting us from the real intention of SEO?  In other words, why do companies care about their rankings in search engines?

Because they think higher rankings will get them the most traffic to their site!

The problem is that companies have attached themselves to the idea that the only way to improve traffic from search results is to get their links higher up on the page.  This short-sighted approach ignores many other ways that you can direct people to your site from search engines that don’t involve rankings.

This is not to say that rankings aren’t important, because they definitely are.  However, instead of measuring the success of your SEO campaign only by the rankings your company has for different keywords, it’s time to shift your focus and start using the amount of search traffic your site gets as the success criteria for your SEO efforts.  Because if your SEO campaign is able to increase search traffic to your site by a respectable margin, without changing your site’s position in the search rankings, I don’t think anyone would consider that a failure.

If you’re committed to making this shift, the first thing you need to do is review your company’s search results with the frame of mind of a human being instead of a search algorithm.  Often companies will try to stuff their pages and website titles with keywords that don’t have any logical meaning or order because it can trick search engines to give you better rankings.

You need to remember that, in order for a search result to become a visit to your site, a human being is also going to have to click on your site’s search results.  Instead of optimizing your page content to please Google, strike a balance between following SEO best practices and providing a helpful user experience to the human beings searching for your company.  It might make you fall slightly down the rankings, but as real people skim the page they will notice that your site’s results are the most clear and helpful and they will click on your link instead of your competition.

After you’ve made your search results human again, you have the opportunity to optimize your results to generate both clicks as well as high rankings.  For example, see if you can find a way to add a call to action to the meta description for your page, which will show up as the description in search engines as well.  If you can figure out a way to incorporate a call to action into the page title, try that also!  Just ensure that it makes sense when it shows up as the heading in someone’s browser as well as in search results.

To quote famous management consultant and best-selling author Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed.”  Switching your performance measures for your SEO campaign from absolute search rankings to the amount of quality traffic or conversions generated from organic searches will go a long way to helping you focus your SEO efforts on the right tactics for appealing to humans searching online instead of computer-based algorithms.  Once you’ve made the switch, it will open you up to an entirely different way of viewing your SEO efforts, and you can begin experimenting with how to optimize your search results for clicks instead of rankings.

Have you worked on increasing clicks for your search results instead of simply trying to rank higher?  Let us know what you did in the comments!