What’s Better than being Ranked #1?

A lot of people fixate on being the number one result on Google. It’s easy to understand why; those number one results are often the first links we click on when doing a search. After all, Google puts those results at the top of the page for a reason, right?

Many times, Internet marketing performance is solely judged by rankings and how high you can get on Google. But contrary to belief, this is not the best way to measure your return on investment. There are other metrics that will tell you way more about the success of your campaign’s performance than just the average position.

There are many factorsthat play into being the number one result on Google, including paid ads, authority and keywords. A lot of these either cost money or a significant amount of time to bring you to those top spots, and even then, you aren’t guaranteed a number one ranking.

When it comes to the health of your website, there are other elements that can accurately depict your site’s growth. These are much more worthwhile to monitor and work on. Instead of focusing on your Google ranking, here’s what you should be paying attention to in order to track your website’s success.

Traffic is a major determinant of how successful your website is. After all, you won’t make it to that number one spot if no one is coming to your website in the first place. There are many aspects you can look at to learn about who is landing on your page and where they’re coming from. These analytics provide a lot more insight into the overall health of your site, including:

• Bounce rate
  
• Time on site
  
• Search queries
  
• Month to month patterns
  
• Year over year patterns
  

You’ll want to track both the amount and quality of traffic coming to your site. It’s better to be in a lower spot and have a decent amount of high-quality leads coming to your site than people who see your name at the top of the page and skip over your site for a competitor. And the more high-quality traffic your site gets, the more likely it is that those leads will turn into conversions.

Conversions are the people who come to your website and turn into leads. They’re the visitors who convert to customers by calling or emailing you and buying in to your services. When it comes to your conversions, ask yourself a few questions:

• Are you getting enough conversions?
  
• Are your leads high quality?
  
• Are they skewed toward one specific service or is there an even distribution of demand?
  

Answering these questions accurately will probably require tracking, which you should be doing anyway if you hope to increase your Google ranking. By looking at how many people are converting to leads, you’ll be able to determine the success rate of your website. If you’re not getting enough conversions, they aren’t high quality or they’re skewed too much toward one particular service, that’s a good indication that your website could use some work. Focus your attention on editing content, adding keywords or better defining the locations you serve.

Also known as cost per conversion, cost per acquisition (CPA) requires tracking to know how many leads—calls and emails—you’ve received as a result of your online marketing efforts. It tells you how much you’ve spent on marketing for each lead you get, and there is a simple formula you can use to figure it out:

We normally like to keep CPA under $45, but depending on your industry, you might be willing to spend more or less on a quality lead. If your CPA is high, you’ll want to make adjustments to your campaign. On the other hand, if your CPA is low, keep doing what you’re doing and your authority—as well as business—will continue to grow.

Although rankings do help overall visibility, it’s hard to track ALL possible search queries that people may be typing in, especially with the rise of mobile technology and “near me” searches. Therefore, rankings are just a small portion of overall success. It’s more important to keep your site’s relevancy up and continue to monitor traffic, conversions and cost per acquisition. These three factors are still important to a healthy website, whether you’re ranked first or last.