Stop obsessing over ranks - Here's why!

Stop obsessing over ranks - Here's why!

Every time I read an SEO based strategies for a new project it always sounds the same and ends up with ranking number one for a bunch of search queries or keywords. 

The essential goal of the SEO specialist is also not understood properly. My goal shouldn't be getting websites ranking in the first position. It should be getting you more sales, more leads and more profit.

And guess what? You can actually have a bigger profit despite the fact that you aren't ranking number 1 for everything under the sun! 

The most important question is: Should we still focus on ranks and do they matter anymore?
Answer: Ranks don't matter as much as used to and you shouldn't dedicate your entire SEO strategy on ranks!

The old idea was simple: if you increase a website's traffic you will get more sales. But, we all know that isn't true in this day and age. I believe websites need to be efficient in getting leads and sales, as efficient as possible and unfortunately, that means you are probably going to get less traffic, but as I said, the quality of the traffic is important not its quantity.  

We all know that organic traffic isn't really free. Are you paying for SEO services? Then it isn't free. 
Are you paying an SEO specialist, are you paying a digital agency to implement SEO tactics or do you do SEO yourself and waste time doing it? Then the answer is simple: organic traffic is not free traffic and I personally hate when SEOs try to sell it that way. 

Now that we got this out of the way and we know organic traffic isn't free we should figure out the most important metric when it comes to making a profit online: CPS (Cost per sale) - how much money do you spend for making one sale and this includes SEO!

Once you start seeing SEO services as a PPC campaign I assure you that you won't have time to obsess over rankings anymore and in the end, if your cost per sales goes down and the number of sales and lead go up you won't really care. 

Here are my main three suggestions for increasing your organic leads and sales although you may lose some rankings and positions:

1. Increase your organic CTR (Click click-through).
You will need to increase your organic CTR because if you have a good organic CTR, theoretically your conversion rates should also go up. To increase your organic CTR you will need to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions, the content that actually appears inside search engines. 

A good optimized title tag and meta description can bring in more clicks even if you aren't in the first position. If you are solving a user's problem they will choose you over your competition even if your competition is more SEO friendly and responds to Google's algorithm better. 
In time you may even get top positions because of your good organic CTR, after the rank brain update Google is capable of understanding human behavior and will increase your ranks of you are answering people's problems better than the competition. 

2. Focus on improving your headlines. 
Stop wasting time developing highly optimized headlines that contain exact matches of your main keywords. Do you need to focus on conversions remember? What type of stuff should you say to keep users around and interested? Put yourself in their shoes, what type of headlines would make you stick around? 

Test your potential headlines in your PPC campaigns, the ones that did the best should be chosen and implemented as real headlines, even if they aren't SEO optimized! Point is that users stick around and conversions go up, that should be your only concern. 

Start researching into emotional words, power words and everything in between. Writing a good headline is an art and if you aren't taking things to the next level you will definitely be left behind by both search engines and your competition. 

3. User experience based design. 
Have you taken into consideration users experience when designing your landing pages? Are they able to handle organic users and meet their needs? No? 

Well, you should better find a designer with strong UIX knowledge because you are missing out! 
Keep mind that most users start reading a web page from the top left corner, do you packed sufficient quality information in that corner to keep your users happy and engaged? Learn to optimize your landing pages for conversions! Everything from design to the actual content should be focused on conversions and not get better rankings!