Why SEOs “Still” Shouldn’t Fixate on Keyword Rankings

By Ethan Lazuk

In the SEO world, new developments can happen quickly.

[Aside: Even while I was writing this article, I learned Google is changing its Perspectives filter to a Forums filter, which means my blog post about Perspectives, written just a few months ago, now needs updating about 80%. That’s how fast it happens!]

Sure, we have timeless and evergreen SEO fundamentals, like technical website foundations, helpful content, and inbound authority signals, but our strategies and tactics to achieve these can (and should) adapt to modern search landscapes.

If your on-page optimizations focus on keyword densities over entity salience, for example, it might be time to brush up on Google Search’s evolutions from lexical to more semantic/hybrid search and neural matching technologies.

The example I wish to talk about here is in a similar theme: why we shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings.

But as much as I’ll explain the argument, I’ll also compare it to an argument from 13 years ago.

As SEOs, our duties often require us to stay informed with current news or at least best practices.

Whether it’s Google’s evolving ranking systems, SERP features, and webmaster guidelines or new AI models, tools, or answer engines, staying abreast of SEO-related developments can feel like its own full-time job.

Fortunately, the SEO community is good at information sharing. I try to do my part each Sunday with Hamsterdam recaps, but there are many others who contribute more often.

However, these circumstances of constantly needing to be aware of the latest information — or at least feeling that impulse — also raise an interesting question, or maybe a conundrum:

Can we pay so much attention to the present (and future) in SEO that we lose sight of the past?

The importance of historical context

Before I got involved in search marketing professionally, I often spent my time on history, politics, and cultural studies.

We see change in history — political figures change, country names or borders change, expectations for human rights change (for better or worse, depending on the legislative body or court makeups) 😉 — but something many historians do well is use their analyses of the past to give us more context for our present.

Like our SEO fundamentals, human nature is also quite timeless, yet circumstances evolve.

I learned in anthropology courses at college (and later studying mindfulness) that a lot of the survival instincts Homo sapiens had as hunter-gatherers in Africa over 60,000 years ago are still with us today.

Except, our environments are much different now, and that creates tensions.

I live in downtown Orlando.

Should I really see a hose on the sidewalk and inherently think it’s a snake on a rural trail?

That is to say, we can safely take a chill pill from listening to many of our evolutionarily induced stressors instincts.

Something else we can do more of in the SEO field specifically — I believe, anyway — is to reflect on the history of our industry and the web.

You can go to most large SEO publication websites and find an article from 2011 with no problem, but the information will be presented as the site design looks today.

I believe looking at information in its historical context helps us appreciate the nuances of the underlying motivations for sharing it.

For example, have you ever seen the U.S. Declaration of Independence on its original parchment?

It’s a bit of a different experience than reading a transcript in Google Gemini.

The information is exactly the same.

But our relation to the motivation for the ideas is quite different.

That’s why, when we discuss historical eras of SEO or Google algorithm changes, I believe it’s helpful to use contemporaneous screenshots from websites.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is one of the coolest resources we have for that.

[Charitable note: The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — some of you may know I offer free SEO help to nonprofits — which I think makes its efforts even cooler. You can support it here.]

I recently used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a client project to retrieve content from past website versions.

That led me down a rabbit hole, which included looking at old versions of SEO publications.

I came across one article, “Why SEOs Shouldn’t Fixate on Keyword Rankings,” written by Rob Chant and published on Search Engine Watch on February 18, 2011.

The title stuck out to me because it’s a sentiment I also share. (More on that in a minute.)

But I was also a bit intrigued because some of the reasons why I believe keywords shouldn’t be fixated on weren’t applicable in 2011, though others were.

In the rest of this article, I’ll compare why I think SEOs shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings to Rob Chant’s arguments in 2011, and we’ll see what’s similar or different and why.

Why we shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings: a comparison of two SEO eras (2024 and 2011)

I wasn’t aware of Rob Chant’s work before this project, but it seems he published quite a few articles on Search Engine Watch from 2010 to 2012. His X profile is private, but I requested a follow. Maybe we can connect, Rob! 🙂

Anyway, I want to put his words in the perspective of the times.

You can view the article’s content on Search Engine Watch, but it looks quite indistinguishable from most current SEO articles you might find:

However, looking at screenshots of the original 2011 version, compliments of Internet Archive, helps us put the article in the context of its time:

For the record, I started in SEO in 2015, four years after this article was published.

That’s a pretty good amount of time, but I’ll be honest, when I do a project for a client today, I’m often like, “Wow, I’m approaching this much differently than I would have just a year or two ago.”

Because we as SEOs can constantly grow and get better as perpetual students of our craft.

That said, I also don’t think years of experience on its own means everything.

[Aside: If someone spends 14 hours a day learning SEO compared to someone spending 7 hours, that difference adds up. After 3 years, it could be relatively said one person has 2 years of experience and the other 4. Then factor in types of learning, amount of tutelage, etc. Experience comparisons get complicated quickly! I say skip ’em.]

What years of experience doing some do invariably add, though, is historical perspective and wisdom. Those can’t be fast-tracked by working more hours in the day.

That’s why it’s worthy of respect.

A sentiment I’ve heard from some veteran SEOs is that newcomers tend to reinvent the wheel, taking a concept that’s years old and making it seem new again.

I try to be sensitive to this.

That said, I also have a tendency not to do any keyword or competitor research for my personal blog articles (mainly it’s for the sake of originality), but I’ll often only later discover when checking the SERPs that several pages about the same topic were published months or years prior.

I’ve also only recently started blogging in earnest on this site, but for as long as I have, I’ve maintained the argument that keyword rankings are becoming obsolete — in other words, they shouldn’t be fixated on.

Here’s Google SGE while browsing (on desktop) summarizing one of my early blog articles, “What Today’s Google Search Ranking Volatility Says About Tomorrow’s SEO Strategies“:

The second bullet point discusses how keyword rankings are becoming obsolete because of Google’s machine learning systems, while the third point talks about focusing on cumulative brand visibility across user journeys instead.

Here are the key points for another blog article about user-centric SEO, “Over Thinking, Over Analyzing: Getting More Visibility on Google Search Through Less Focus on SEO Tactics (A People-First Approach)“:

The second bullet point again says how keywords are becoming obsolete and the focus should be on cumulative organic search visibility.

Finally, here are the key points for my article on helpful content, “People Tell Me What to Say: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content for Google Search in 2024 & Beyond (An SEO Deep Dive)“:

The second bullet point mentions how focusing on keyword rankings is what drives “traditional” tactics (namely “search engine-first content”), whereas the emphasis should be instead on user search intent (and visibility along user journeys).

So, you can see that it’s a topic I’m interested in.

My 2024 argument: keyword rankings are becoming obsolete

My argument for why keyword rankings are becoming obsolete is partly based on the volatility of today’s SERPs (influenced by AI-based systems) and also the increasing ways brands can earn visibility organically beyond traditional web results.

Examples of organic surfaces not tied to keyword rankings (per se) include:

• Google SGE
• Google Discover
• Google People also view
• Google shopping graph results (organic product listings)
• Google knowledge graph results (knowledge panels)
• Social media content in Search (Perspectives)
• AI answer engines (Perplexity, Copilot with Bing)
• AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini)

Because so many of these organic surfaces aren’t reflected in keyword rankings, I believe such rankings data gives an incomplete and skewed picture of a brand’s true organic visibility and potential for brand awareness and qualified traffic.

But there’s more.

Even when keyword rankings apply, like in traditional web search results, the amount of variation day-to-day from changing SERP features, device types, and personalization, not to mention ongoing fluctuations in rankings from machine learning systems, makes keyword rankings less reliable.

You almost have to check the SERPs manually every day to give the average position for a query enough context to fully understand its movement up or date, or its relation to CTR.

Additionally, today’s semantic SEO strategies often involve making entity connections to achieve relevance for topics along buyer’s journeys, and that means webpages can rank for a myriad of keywords they aren’t lexically matched to.

Instead of keyword rankings, I focus on cumulative organic visibility along buyer’s journeys.

This means accounting for the fact that SEO often supports brand awareness and authority building in ways that contribute to (assist) conversions via other online and offline marketing channels.

That makes SEO’s ROI harder to measure, sure, but it’s also why we need to frame SEO as an overarching channel that should strategize and report KPIs alongside social media, paid ads, email, PR, and other marketing channels.

The time change factor

Some of my argument was applicable in 2011 when Rob wrote his article, but a lot of it wasn’t.

Google didn’t introduce the knowledge graph until May 2012, while the shopping graph wasn’t announced until May 2021.

Discover didn’t come out until September 2018, while SGE and Perspectives were both May 2023.

As for ChatGPT, that came out in November 2022, and pretty much all other AI announcements followed.

Suffice to say, none of that was around in 2011.

That doesn’t mean SERPs were strictly 10-blue links then. Here’s a screenshot of a Google SERP in June of 2011 (with some updates made a few months after Rob’s article):

That said, since the knowledge graph wasn’t introduced until 2012, and RankBrain (the first deep learning system, though likely not the first AI or machine learning system) wasn’t introduced until 2015, a lot of search results (and optimization) was likely based on lexical (keyword) optimizations and links (the PageRank toolbar was still shown until March 2016).

In other words, a lot of the entity- and AI-informed SEO strategies of today, which underpin at least most of my argument for why keyword rankings are becoming obsolete, weren’t around yet.

So why was Rob Chant arguing in 2011 that SEOs shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings?

Well, let’s turn to his article to find out!

Rob Chant’s 2011 argument: SEOs shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings

I don’t want to paste in Rob’s whole article verbatim. However, I do want to ensure the words are seen in their original context while also readable on mobile devices, so I’ll do a screenshot followed by a citation, and I’ll just focus on a couple of key excerpts.

Let’s start with the introduction.

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is a game that’s simple in principle and surprisingly complex in execution. There are hundreds of strategies, dozens of opportunities and, to top it all off, the playing field is always changing.

Everyone has different advice. It’s almost impossible to relate cause directly to effect, so you’re never quite sure what is and isn’t working. Figuring out what to measure isn’t even straightforward.”

From the first sentence, I think we can see a difference in approaches across eras.

It spells out “search engine optimization” then links the acronym to that day’s category page. (The link on the live version on Search Engine Watch today has been updated to a 2007 article called “Search Engine Optimization.”)

Looking at this by today’s people-first content standards, we probably wouldn’t spell out SEO for an SEO audience, assuming they know what the acronym means.

We probably also wouldn’t link to a page with “SEO” anchor text in the first sentence with no directly related purpose for the user.

Again, I wasn’t doing SEO in 2011, where such methods were likely more useful in a heavily lexical and link-driven search environment. But I don’t think we’d do that today.

I also want to point to a few sentiments in the introduction: “the playing field is always changing,” “impossible to relate cause directly to effect,” and “never quite sure what is and isn’t working.”

Now, some of that is just as true or more so today, while some is a little more tenuous.

We’re able to measure cause and effect of certain things. If we change a title tag and see that CTR changes, that’s a reasonable inference, controlling for other variables. Then again, maybe other SERP changes were at play.

Which gets to the spirit of that next idea that we’re not sure what works or doesn’t. Though, I’d argue we have fairly strong best practices outlined today. (But even books like The Art of SEO were around as early as 2009.)

Let’s look at the rest of the introduction:

“However, many businesses of all sizes put enormous weight on one metric: keyword ranking. Businesses tend to be specifically interested in ranking for one “high profile keyword” (or a small group of these keywords).

The reason seems obvious — surely, if you hit the top spot for your chosen keyword, you’re hitting the jackpot, right? And, let’s face it, it’s a great ego brand-booster.

“But focusing on position, especially for a small group of keywords — and especially to the detriment of other factors — is a terrible idea. It’s usually isn’t best investment in a campaign or a good indicator of the overall health of a campaign. Let’s look at why.”

This idea of businesses focusing on individual keywords, I think many SEOs can relate to that, even still today.

In my experience, it’s usually a sentiment based on historical SEO knowledge or a lack of the elementals.

But I’d imagine in 2011 that sentiment was even more pronounced than it is today.

Except, a lot of clients I meet don’t really care about keyword rankings, at least deep down. I mean, some do early on, but ultimately it’s about how those rankings (or any organic visibility) translates to meet their business goals.

Ranking number one for a competitive keyword is cool, but does that translate into sales, signups, or qualified leads?

It seems that’s the same direction Rob Chant’s argument is also taking.

He goes on to talk about “The Keyword Ranking Trap,” which outlines the problems of focusing on top rankings.

The first is that it’s risky because you don’t know the CTR of the keyword or how well the traffic will convert, and you’re at the whims of “algorithm changes.”

The second is that it’s hard, and the amount of investment needed to get there can be large, and it may never happen.

I’d bet the introduction of RankBrain in 2015 and other innovations to push SERPs towards better alignment with a query’s underlying search intent have only made that “never happen” aspect truer for many instances.

The third is that it’s directly competitive. Now, this one I want to include verbatim because I think it speaks to a different mindset about search optimization than we may have today.

“It’s directly competitive: Unlike long tail traffic, for example, you’re going directly head to head with other serious players. And it’s just the nature of competition that, sooner or later, there’ll be someone out there who has more money to burn, is tougher, is smarter, or is sneakier than you. If you can knock someone out of the top spot, someone else can do the same to you.”

Personally, I’m less concerned with what competitors are doing than I am with doing the best job for my own audience. I’d argue competitor fixation and imitation is also how we’ve wound up with claims of generic content or website experiences that get called “SEO spam.”

I also think the “sneakier than you” part speaks to an earlier era of SEO where gamification of search ranking signals could be more of a focus than user-first optimizations, but I wasn’t there. 🙂

The fourth is that keyword rankings aren’t a bottom-line metric, and that “conversions are what you need.” This speaks to a timeless theme of using SEO to achieve business goals, which both of our arguments share.

The fifth point is that it’s a red herring, mentioning how the clients always want to rank for the next better keyword and it distracts attention from other goals.

While the sixth and final point is that generic keywords aren’t the best quality traffic, and focusing on them can lead to missing bigger opportunities.

Now I kind of understand the article’s context a little better.

A lot of these points stand today, like not wasting energy or the difference between qualified vs. unqualified traffic for conversions.

But it also sounds like this article is being specifically written about head terms, so there may be a vocabulary difference where long-tail keywords is a different category.

In the conclusion, the suggestions for what to do instead of focusing on keyword rankings are to work with a range of keywords “at different levels of competition and potential traffic,” to go for “long tail traffic,” and to work with “analytics and conversion optimization.”

We see some interesting themes here.

When I saw the mention of competition levels, my first thought was keyword tool difficulty scores, which I haven’t paid attention to for years.

But maybe it just means competition in general, like from higher authority sites. That had me thinking about how Google’s use of machine learning today means even smaller sites can compete in competitive SERPs based on the merits of their content. (It doesn’t always work that way, but it can.)

This also kind of speaks to the “people-first content” and “hidden gems improvement” aspects of the last few years of ranking system adjustments, not to mention the integration of the helpful content system into Google’s core ranking systems.

The other interesting theme is the mention of conversion optimization. This is kind of a future-thinking recommendation, as he notes it’s “not strictly speaking a part of SEO,” yet CRO has become more integrated with SEO best practices, particularly page experience optimizations.

Summing it up

Overall, there are some interesting similarities and differences to our arguments, which may help elucidate aspects of how SEO has remained consistent or evolved from 2011 to 2024.

We’re both saying that keyword rankings don’t translate to business goals directly, so instead the focus should be on goals like conversions.

In a 2011 context, he seems to be talking more about a predilection for head term rankings and inter-site competition in a more game-able and lexically based search environment.

While in a 2024 context, I’m more referring to the dynamic environment of search given AI-based ranking systems, as well as the wider playing field of organic surfaces not tied to keyword rankings, many of which didn’t exist in 2011.

I also think reading Rob Chant’s article in its original context helps us better grasp his arguments given that time period.

Seeing the Search Engine Watch website layout in 2011, I was better able to envision the world of SEO that he was describing.

My hope is that this article helps to make the case for doing more SEO historical studies, particularly comparisons of strategies at different time periods to uncover which aspects of SEO are more timeless and which have evolved for today’s era.

That said, just as in 2011, SEOs still shouldn’t fixate on keyword rankings. 😉

“The same old way”

I’ll revisit this article to improve the writing and maybe add some new thoughts or screenshots that can enrich the conversation.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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