The death of “ranking factors” — Brianna Anderson // BEAST Analytics

Quotes

• “I think that there are obviously things that are going to help your website rank. However, I also believe that there are many things outside of the algorithm as we think about it that are contributing to how well you rank. Things that we cant control like user behavior and social signal.” -Brianna

• “Maybe we have to number something on our website as opposed to just having an unordered list and a lot of those micro-conversions that you are talking about.” -Brianna

• “When we talk about finding those micro-conversions, you can do this a lot of different ways, such as going through the behavior flow, going through competitor site, giving ideas and advice and this is something I like about the search industry, most of us are pretty open about how we do things.” -Brianna

• “To me, ranking factors are a construct built by the SEO community that gives us a shared sense of what to look at when we are trying to optimize a search campaign.” -Ben

• “When I thinkabout the umpteenth million conversations that weve had about ranking factors over the last few years, sure its a topic that is a little tired. You and I can talk about conversion rate optimization or finding other ways to understand user behavior, we are all talking about the same thing. We are all trying to figure out what Google is looking at that are going to make our pages higher and make us more competitive in their eyes.” -Ben

• “I guess one of my biggest complaints is that as SEOs, we tend to think Google first instead of User first when at the end of the day, Googles goal or should be their goal is to answer the question as quickly as possible, in the best way possible for the user.” -Brianna

• “My argument is that is if you have great content, you know who your audience and you can answer your audiences question in the best way possible that you can think of, then you are on the right path. There are obviously going to be things outside of that, but you lay the foundation and then focus on answering the question in the best way possible.” -Brianna

• “I will say it again, Google does not tell the whole truth. They withhold some information. I truly believe that when it comes to backlinks as a ranking factor, doesnt matter who is talking about you. If Forbes is going to link to you, thats probably going to do better than Becky from down the street. Heres why, because when I talk about ranking factors, it is more than that.” -Brianna

• “Lets say Becky gets 10 visits to her site every month. Maybe 1 is going to click through to go to your website but Forbes, however, gets so many and 300 people come to your website. So if you are getting much more traffic from that link, that still gives Google more data to go through to see whether or not you are answering those questions. So if you have one person coming and spending five minutes on your site, or a hundred people spending five minutes on your site, then yeah that backlink is going to make a big difference.” -Brianna

• “As we circle back to, Are ranking factors actually dead? I think the answer is no. It is a construct made by the SEO community to try and figure out what is going to impact rankings. It is a concept and not a static thing of these are the ranking factors.” -Ben

• “You cant think of ranking factors as, kind of like in a vacuum. And that is really what is complicated in SEO today, we are brand marketers as much as we are performance marketers.” -Ben

• “The more that we talk and the morethat I learn about SEO and organic growth, the more that I realize that you really have to use your judgment taken all the data that we have available to us.” -Ben

• “Everyones business is a unique snowflake and we have to start thinking holistically as marketers as opposed to looking at optimization tactics in a vacuum.” -Ben