By Elmer on April 27, 2009

One of the obvious objectives of SEO clients is to get their pages ranked on top of search engine results. And who could blame these clients, who are unaware of what is the real purpose of SEO?

So when we pose the question in title, their likely answer is yes. They simply have no other idea how to view success. You rank and you don’t rank is synonymous to success and failure, respectively. So if BeansBox does not find itself on first page of “hong kong web design”, will it consider itself a failure in SEO?

Maybe yes, only if BeansBox had defined its primary objective as “ranking for hong kong web design on first page of search results”. But it’s not. I guess it’s more about making money, meeting people and enjoy building websites.

Sometimes, I feel bad about coming up with a list of keywords for a client, make measurements later, and find out that very few of the supposed selected keywords don’t ever rank on first few pages. But looking at the big picture, if these keywords have guided the copywriter to write compelling content using these terms or their synonyms, and generated traffic for these related terms, then it’s not that bad after all.

It would even be better if such related terms were key in generating leads for the website.

The bottom line is that if a business relies too much on top rankings, it will eventually fail, as top rankings isn’t a business objective. No business model would thrive using such objective. For what does top ranking mean, if it does not generate traffic, let alone engagement from visitors.

A much better scenario would be that a page shows up quite prominently for a targeted yet unpopular keyword, the visitor likes what she sees, responds to the call to action invite (subscribes to RSS feeds, comments on the blog or fills up the “contact us” form) and eventually becomes a client.

Therefore, keyword ranking failure should not be the be all and end all of online business. And keyword ranking success don’t often mean success in online business. To me failure means a method does not work, discard it, replace with another one and put best effort to make that one work. We learn from failures and mistakes are excellent teachers. Before you succeed, you’re likely bound to fail, but what could be worse than setting wrong measurement of success and failure in the first place?

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