I just read Lee’s post entitled “Are Search Engine Rankings are Dead?”, with the followup “R.I.P. Search Engine Rankings?” from Jennifer at Search Engine Guide.

Are they right? Partially. Yes, the landscape has changed. That said, it hasn’t changed enough to a point where the ranking is no longer a metric. Similar to the reported “death of the page view” as a web metric. Until there are some major changes in the advertising and publishing businesses the page view will remain to be the metric with which billions of dollars worth of business is exchanged.

Why are rankings still important?

• Because not everyone is as internet savvy as you.
  • We as an industry may realize that ranking for “blue widgets” doesn’t matter because it pulls in less traffic and less conversions than “red widgets”, but many others do not. I had a real world example of this earlier this year when one of our East Coast based sales reps asked me to put together a list of rankings revolving around a specific company name. He didn’t care what traffic it generated. The rankings themselves were the sales material he needed when walking into his presentation.

• Because it helps to measure performance & trends.
  • Tracking specific rankings and referrals from each will allow you to measure the overall performance of your SEO campaign.  Small fluctuations won’t give you much insight, but if a monthly report comes out with decreases or increases across the board you’ll be able to identify a need for change.  It also allows you to identify trends.  Let’s say your boss notices a decrease in Google referrals over the past two months and asks whether this is a result of negative performance from the SEO campaign.  You may find that none of the rankings have changed or shifted dramatically and that the change in traffic is seasonal or the result of an economical factor like rising gas prices or the war.

• Because it gives you goals.
  • If you aren’t targeting a specific keyword, what are you targeting?  If you’re #5 with XXX referrals a day, don’t you think the #1 spot will get you more traffic?  Targeting a specific keyword or set gives you goals that your team can work towards.

So, after all this, what could or should your SEO reports entail?   We have a custom reporting system that we built in-house.  Here are some of the things that we report to the various teams and executives.

• Traffic (page views, uniques, visits) trends
• Search engine rankings by engine w/ trending
• Search engine referrals by engine w/ trending
• Site conversions by type
• Conversion rates by type
• Site “health” w/ trending - this includes pages indexed, backlinks, PR, Alexa, etc.

What do your reports include?