What are your thoughts on ranking reports?

Matt's answer:

MATT CUTTS: Hey, everybody. I wanted to make a video that you could mail to your boss or your client whenever they’re being a little bit disagreeable because they want to have a number one trophy phrase, where they insist that they want to rank or get ranking reports. So why is it a little less helpful to obsess about a trophy phrase or to really, really want to get a ream of paper filled out with all these ranking reports, where you can look at all the different ways that you rank? Well, it really doesn’t matter as much if you have one trophy phrase that you really care about if that phrase doesn’t convert that much. So think about it this way. We get crawled all the time. Crawling happens. And pages rank as a result of that. But it doesn’t really matter if you rank number three or number five if you get the user to click through. So if you pay attention to something like your snippets. So if you maybe have a good meta description tag. And it doesn’t really matter if the user comes in on a trophy phrase or on another phrase. What you really care about is whether that person converts. And so it’s probably not the best use of your time to pay attention to ranking reports. It’s much better to pay attention to, for example, your server logs. That will tell you what people are actually showing up for, the volume that they’re showing up in. And even your server logs are not as useful as trying to look at your conversion rates, your ROI. Because maybe you care about newsletter subscriptions, or maybe you have a certain action that you want people to do. But a lot of people who are doing search engine optimization are ultimately trying to make money. They’re trying to sell products, or they’re trying to sell subscriptions, or whatever it is. And you might rank number one for newsletters, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll actually get people to convert for that phrase. So rather than obsessing about this thing way up high in the funnel where a bunch of people might be doing exploratory searches but not really looking to buy, it’s much better to pay attention to the keyword research, to pay attention to your server logs, to pay attention to how long people stay on the site as far as whether they convert or whether– are there ways you can streamline the buying process once people start to fill out their credit card and that sort of thing? There are some very simple ways where you can say, oh, what makes it easier for people to convert to customers? So I wouldn’t worry about what is my page rank. I wouldn’t worry about my number one trophy phrase so much as the actual traffic, the actual amount of conversions, the actual amount of ROI, the actual amount of money, because that’s the ultimate metric that matters. So it doesn’t pay as much to hang up and get really obsessed about the things that don’t matter when what does matter is how well you’re ultimately converting your visitors toward whatever goal it is you have. So that’s the thing that I would pay more attention to. Don’t pay nearly as much attention to what is my page rank, what is my ranking report, and what’s my trophy phrase ranking, because that doesn’t matter nearly as much. Concentrate on the things that matter.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: