By Amy Munice

This self-described “formerly wounded web copywriter” has learned the hard way to notice red flags of out-of-date notions of how search engines work. Too many times, I was saddled with the task of taking custom proprietary web designs or web templates and somehow cobbling together web copy that would generate leads. I was flying blind. As a “wounded web copywriter” I was watching our PR company’s clients get victimized by SEO consultants’ instructions that, when followed, led to web copy that might have given web crawlers a good read but was pure jabberwocky to human eyes and ears.

It did not work!

Not being comfortable as a victim - or watching others get victimized - I went on a mission to learn how search engines really work. That in turn led me to the man that the U.S. Patent Office hires to teach its patent officers who approve all new media innovations how search engine optimization and search engines really work. The gap between what this man, Mike Marshall, has to say about search engines and also the venerable likes of Google’s Matt Cutts with what is pandemic in certain SEO consultant circles has inspired this series.

Let’s begin by asking the question of this article’s title—“Is Site Ranking Real or Relevant??”

Quick answer—NOT REALLY.

When SEO consultants start talking about site ranking they are actually waving a big red flag that their SEO knowledgebase is out-of-date. Site ranking is more of a red herring than an indicator of what really matters—traffic, leads and conversions.

Here’s a brief overview of why—and in later articles in this series we will drill down into greater detail.

1. Online marketing today is challenged by the way in which search engines – all search engines—now favor local companies. This can be of great import or have minimal impact, depending on whether a company’s business is local in nature, where their competitors are, whether competitors have many global offices and many different country-specific URLs, and the very real but barely discernable factor to those who do not follow certain niche technical markets closely on just how “good” various search engines are at sorting out products and services that in the REAL world are actually sourced globally.

2. Personalized search algorithms have also changed the rules. If you do not have in your search engine optimization knowledgebase AND toolkit the math know-how to transform personalized search algorithms from obstacles into advantages your internet marketing processes are not in synch with today’s search engines. In my experience this factor is HUGE. It seems that every week I am talking to someone who thinks that their site is always “number one”. In fact my first conversation along these lines was a few years ago with a very smart VP Marketing of a UK company that made a product used by a wide swathe of industries—from food to pharma to agriculture etc. She explained that though public relations was important to them and they potentially sought those types of services, it would be irrelevant to their web marketing efforts since they were “always number one”. As we spoke I was scrolling through every page of my Google search and could not find their company –giving up on page ten. It was not through the Internet that I knew of them—although the U.S. was one of their market targets. Rather, it was through an informed editor of a highly technical healthcare publication who had met them at a trade show and was very impressed with their technology. This VP Marketing was being served up a solipsistic misperception by personalized search algorithms. She is NOT alone.

3. Social media is impacting search now—but how it does and the extent to which it does is a very rapidly moving target in any unique competitive landscape on the web. Many do not realize how geographically-bound these social networks are. Companies that sell globally and remain ignorant of these facts may be brewing a big problem for themselves that will rear its head sooner or later.

4. While even the European Union had recently suggested that Google was stacking the deck in favor of advertisers, this seems far less true to those who pay attention on how to use Google advertising as a way to speed up the success of much slower moving search engine optimization efforts. That, more than “dirty pool” on the part of Google, seems to explain the growing divide.

So why is site ranking not that important? Think of it this way—

Yes, you need math tools that will give a real reading of your site’s ranking and what your competitive landscape is on the web. Even if YOU delete your cookies religiously, and do the equivalent of turning off personalized search algorithms in a Chrome browser—are your customers? And will that really be handling localized search, the increasing import of social media, video, etc.?

Site ranking gets you in the deck of cards. BUT assuming it’s a 50-card deck, other algorithms at work are making your site number one for some, number 50 for others, and everything in between.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series which will lay bare the myth that attempting to reverse engineer Google Algorithms (or any search engine algorithms) is an SEO strategy that has even a prayer of success.

About the author

Amy Munice is President of ALM Communications, now also d.b.a. Global B2B Communications. A self-described “formerly wounded web copywriter”, Ms. Munice is on a mission to clear up widespread misunderstandings of how worldwide search engines work that affect her 20+ year PR firm’s clientele and similar companies that sell B2B services and products worldwide.

About the company

ALM Communications serves B2B companies that sell math, science, engineering or other technical products or services worldwide. ALM is a global PR company that that incorporates state-of-the-art artificial intelligence-based search engine optimization tools into all PR campaigns.