5 Reasons to Stop Obsessing About Your Website's PageRank
The following is a guest post written by Tim Gray, a content strategist for Blue Fountain Media.
One of the greatest joys of running a business online is the ability to measure results. Yet the very metrics that are supposed to help define the success or failure of your Web efforts are often poorly understood.
The most famous part of Google's ranking algorithm, PageRank, has been confusing website owners for years. By itself it can't do very much. But it can be useful if you understand how it works and recognize its many limitations.
However, even Google suggests you're better off not focusing on it too much. Here are five reasons why (below I'll tell you what you should focus on instead):
1. A high PageRank does not mean your website will rank high in Google's search results. That's because PageRank, which lists scores ranging from zero to 10 and can be viewed when you download it as part of the Google Toolbar, is only one of 200 factors that determine your ranking. Pouring time and money into trying to change this number won't tell you how your website is performing, and higher scores often lead businesses into a false sense of complacency. It's an easy metric to focus on, but that doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. PageRank is based primarily on quality and quantity of the number of outside Web pages that link to your site, and over the years Google has adjusted the importance of the metric by improving the overall system.
2. A higher PageRank will not increase traffic to your site. PageRank has nothing to do with traffic. Consider that 94.75% of all search result clicks occur on the first page of Google, and that websites experience a 143% increase in traffic when going from spot #11 (page two) to #10 (page one). Simply put, if PageRank can't move you up the ranking ladder to the first page, it's not going to increase traffic either. A more valuable approach is to optimize your website for keywords that are valuable to your business.
3. Google only updates PageRank a few times a year. The same business owners expending great effort expecting immediate PageRank results, often fall into the trap of adjusting and tweaking their efforts when they don't see any movement on their PageRank. What they don't realize is Google doesn't change these numbers often. In fact, in 2010 the company went a full nine months before adjusting PageRank. In the end, it's another time-suck that leads you further away from your true goals.
4. Your publicly available PageRank figure is not the same number Google's algorithm uses for ranking. The real number is a secret. Google uses a completely different, nonpublic database, whose values (fractional numbers rather than a zero to 10 scale) are updated continuously. Now, you must be wondering why anyone ever thought PageRank was meaningful and manageable in the first place.
5. Focusing on your PageRank will distract you from the metrics that really matter. Why bother with a metric that is at best three steps removed from your actual goals, when you could instead directly measure (on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis) the results you hope to achieve?
Instead of focusing on moving your PageRank from 4 to 7, try using these metrics to increase your chances of online success:
Conversion rate: Use Google Analytics to measure your conversion rate (percentage of unique visitors who complete a "goal" such as a purchase or submission of a Web form). As a result, you'll gain a better understanding of how many visitors are coming to your site, and then taking the next step to interact with your business.
Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking any links. Google Analytics can track this, too, so you can figure out where on your site this happens the most and why.
Click-through rate (CTR): The higher the CTR the better your pages are performing. A low CTR means that no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren't clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don't think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks like a better option. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site's titles and snippets in Google's search results: Make sure they accurately represent the content of each URL and determine if they give searchers a reason to click on them.
Another way to boost CTR is to use A/B split testing. Choose two different versions of the same webpage and split the available traffic evenly between them. Study the different types of activity that occurs on each page to determine which is more effective in helping meet your goals. For example, if visitors to page A perform a desired action more often than visitors to Page B, than you know which design is more effective.
Tim Gray is a Content Strategist and writes about social media and search engine optimization on Blue Fountain Media's blog.