Do you know what the number one email request I get is?
Come on, take a guess. What do you think it is?
Ok, its people asking me for money.
But, do you know what the second most common email request I get is?
Companies asking me to rank them number 1 on Google for a specific term.
And I have to say, it’s a big waste of time for you to focus all of your energy on ranking number 1 on Google for a specific term or even a handful of terms.
Just take a look at my site… here’s my Google traffic over the last 31 days:
As you can see from the graph, I’m generating 2,375,455 organic visits from search engines each month.
And can you guess how many keywords I’m tracking when it comes to my rankings?
A big fat ZERO!
I’m not saying I don’t do SEO, I’m saying I don’t focus on rankings.
Can you increase your search traffic without tracking rankings?
The short answer is yes.
As you saw from the graph above, I’m getting over 2 million visits from organic search each month. If you look back a year, I was getting 970,459 visitors a month from search.
Read more here.
Conclusion
Yes, you want to continually improve your search traffic over time, but obsessing over whether or not a keyword is ranking number 1 doesn’t mean much.
SEO has moved to a long-tail strategy. The goal isn’t to rank for one keyword, or even a hundred or a thousand… the goal is to rank for hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords over time.
And as long as that trend is continually going up and to the right, you’re fine.
One way to see if things are going directionally right is to use Ubersuggest. When you put in your domain, you’ll see a chart that looks something like this:
You want the total number of keywords to increase over time and you want the small green bar to continually go up over time as that means a higher portion of your listings are moving up in Google.
So, are you going to continue focusing on rankings?
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