Many people who have got a bit of an SEO addiction make a habit of checking their rankings in Google every day. The more obsessive do it two to three times per day. You know who you are.
They may do it manually, or they may use a tool like serpbook.com, opensiteexplorer.com or Traffic Travis to see how they are ranking for their set of important search terms.
Search engine rankings are really easy to measure, so measure it we do. By the millions. This is natural and normal behaviour, but is it time well spent?
What most web site owners do not do is click on their Google results listing, open the page, slip on their prospects’ shoes and ask the hard question: “so what happens next?”
You see getting targeted traffic to your web site is just a small part of the story. What comes next is just as important.
In the olden days this stuff was referred to as “marketing“.
Next time you are tempted to check your Google rankings, pause, take a deep breath, open your web site and ask yourself:
- What is the single clear message I want to visitor to get?
- What types of visitors do I want to engage with?
- What types of visitors do I want to reject? [aka not all business is good business]
- What social proof can I offer?
- What impression does the web site give?
- What do I want my visitors to do, to think, to feel, to believe?
- What is a small change I can test that may make a difference?
