Your Keyword Rankings are Worthless

Full Podcast Transcript

Darren: Back for another edition of The Hoist Hangout. Today we're going to be talking about keyword rankings, specifically, how much attention should you pay to them? Are they misleading you? Are they worthless looking at those rankings? How that impacts everything that business owners should be doing. Let's start with Ryan giving us a little history on why rankings, at one time, were so very important to businesses. What'd you got, Ryan?

Ryan: Oh yeah, they were. You're right. A hundred percent. I would say in general, your keyword rankings are somewhat worthless. I think we're going to unpack that over this next period of time here. Let me dive into a little bit about my history, starting with this in the early-2000s and going up to now, because it's cool. Quite different now than it was back then. See, in the late 2000s, the early 2010s ranking first organically was the big thing. That's what all businesses wanted.

They would reach out to agencies like ours, to freelancers or whoever, and say, "We want to rank number one." That was the most common request that you would hear across the board. Okay. That's kind of a carryover into today. You still hear, "We want to rank number one. We want to rank number one." The problem is, things have changed so much from back then till now. Back then, if you wanted to rank number one and you did rank number one, that was the same for everybody.

Mobile rankings weren't really a thing back then. Chances are if you ranked number one for a term, it was more nationally, than just locally. Results really weren't personalized back then. Ranking number one really was a haymaker for a lot of people. If they could rank number one, they could really do well. That was why it was so competitive and people were so hung up on keyword rankings. The thing is, it did work back then, but things have changed.

Results are personalized. I think some SEO companies made a big stink about ranking number one, and really it should be a lot different. They should focus more on how much profit you make or how has your marketing turned into leads or customers or things like that. Ranking number one isn't the end-all be-all. In fact, it's just so different nowadays compared to back then that I personally don't think it should be something that we focus on here.

Maybe this is our own problem that we need to undo, I think, but this is basically the shift in algorithms and we have to shift our mindset along with that. I talked about how the algorithms are there and how results are personalized and things have changed a little bit, but Darren, you know a lot more about search ranking factors than I do. You've studied it a little bit more than I have too.

Darren: Well, yeah. To your point, Ryan, we actually don't even share rankings to our clients anymore. We removed those from our reports a number of years ago, simply because we thought they were very misleading, perhaps inaccurate. And when we removed those, no one said a word.

Ryan: Not a peep. That's the weirdest thing.

Darren: It's like no one missed it.

Ryan: We created this custom software for our SEO reports. I would say a bulk of the time was getting those ranking graphs dialed in. There was a lot of work that went into that because that was the big meat of the report. When we switched that over to show profit and KPIs and things like that, I thought for sure, we were going to hear something from every single client and it was the opposite. We heard nothing from a single client. They love the new layout because what matters to a business is revenue, money. Are we getting money from your marketing efforts?

Darren: Right. Right.

Ryan: Yeah. It was quite interesting. When we look at what actually goes into search ranking factors, we can see that it's not the same across the board, right Darren?

Darren: Right. Right. Speaking of those-- documented, there's probably over 200 ranking factors out there that SEOs around the world have attributed various ranking input on. Just for today, I'll just mention three. These are three big ones. I won't say they're the top three, but they definitely are near the top. It's going to be location, device, and as you touched on Ryan, personalization. Those three play a significant role in how Google search results are provided.

First of all, location. That's an obvious one. If you're standing outside a plumbers shop outside, right outside the front door and search for a plumber, there's a good chance-- a very good chance-- that the shop that you're right next to will show up, hopefully first. If not first, at least on that first page. That's going to happen more times than not. The shop that's a thousand miles away in another state will never show up first, okay. That's just based on location. Google knows your location and they're going to provide results based on that.

Ryan: Do you think that has something to do with the meteoric trend that happened a handful of years ago with the “near me” phrases where SEOs saw this happening and then they started to optimize for the near me because people were trying to search local?

Darren: Oh, without question. Yeah. Yeah. What's ironic is the “near me,” those searches have been reduced greatly.

Ryan: Oh, yeah.

Darren: Because the user knows that when they submit a query to Google, Google's going to give them the best results possible and it's heavily weighted based on location. They have that.

Another significant weighted factor is device. Mobile versus desktop. Obviously, the huge thing here is if you're a business owner and your website is not mobile-friendly, you have very little chance of being seen in a mobile search. That's why whenever we talk to the clients or prospects, we say they got to focus on mobile or at least have their website be mobile friendly. Because if not, they're going to lose a lot of traffic just because search is shifting so much to the mobile device, that Google's actually giving mobile websites preference now in their search results.

Ryan: Also, for keyword rankings, is it the case where something could rank higher just because you're on a mobile device only because the website's done better?

Darren: Yes. Without question.

Ryan: Okay.

Darren: To tie these two, device and location together, a third of all mobile searches are related to location. It's just something you've got to keep in mind--a big thing to keep in mind--when you think about not only your business, how you're catering to your customers. If your customers aren't on mobile devices, okay, it may not be as important, but there is a strong possibility that they are, especially if you're in a home service industry. Anything that people want answers to quick, they're going to be on the mobile device.

The third thing is personalization. I intentionally tried to trick Google and I did a little test with personalization. What I did was I entered the term bass, B-A-S-S. Now, that can also be considered bass, right? I searched for bass or bass, however you want to look at it. The results that I got were, I got Bass Factory Outlet, the clothing store, right? GH Bass & Company. Those were my results. Further down the list, there were more results about the fish, right?

Ryan: Oh, okay.

Darren: I scrolled down to the bottom of the page, started clicking on those fish-related results. Clicked on a few, went back to the search engine results page, clicked on another one, so on and so forth. Closed that window. Opened up a new window, searched for bass again. Guess what? Right there in the knowledge panel is information about the fish, right? Google had personalized my search results based on past search behavior. That's all it took. Two searches.

Ryan: In that same breath, we have a developer upstairs who actually has a bass guitar at his house and he plays the bass. He probably researches a lot of stuff about music and he follows a lot of bands and he follows a lot of stuff on YouTube about bass and about music. Is there a chance if he types in B-A-S-S that it's personalized to him and he'll get something about maybe a bass guitar?

Darren: Without question. Without question. Google specifically uses ... They draw information for personalization from everything. If you're a Gmail user, if you use Google Calendar, Google Play, Google Maps, everything. They will grab information from those items to determine you and your interests and use that to personalize your search results and ultimately provide you a better experience.

Ryan: Cool.

Darren: One item of note, it is possible to turn off that personalization search, but you know what Google's going to do? They're still going to personalize your searches as long as they have your location.

Ryan: Yeah. Okay.

Darren: All right. Here, let's try something real quick. There's three of us here, Ryan, Elin and Darren.

Ryan: What are we doing?

Darren: Let's get out your mobile device and a quick search for “restaurant.” We're going to see how this works. We're all in the same room.

Elin: Wait.

Darren: Yeah. Go ahead, Elin.

Elin: My phone's upstairs.

Darren: Let's just go, Ryan. You and I will search.

Ryan: Do it from your laptop.

Elin: Okay.

Darren: Elin's going to search on a desktop. Ryan and I-

Ryan: What are we searching for?

Darren: Just search “restaurant.”

Ryan: Just “restaurant.” Just the word “restaurant.”

Darren: Yep. Yep. Let's see if personalization ... So location shouldn't matter, device will matter, but the point is we want to see if personalization matters.

Ryan: Sure. This will be interesting. I'm curious.

Darren: I got a map pack, list of restaurants near me. In that pack I have Pagoda, Donatelli's and Black Sea. Do you have those three?

Ryan: No. No. Actually-

Darren: What do you have?

Ryan: First thing I got served up was an ad for Chili's and then there's three locations underneath. The closest one on Beam Avenue in Maplewood. Underneath that, I have a pack that has takeout delivery, Vietnamese, Chinese. It's the cuisine and service options, which you can swipe left or right and determine the style of food you want. Underneath that, I have the map pack with Black Sea, Pagoda, Donatelli's.

Darren: In that order?

Ryan: In that order.

Darren: Okay. My order's a little bit different.

Ryan: I have gone to the Black Sea a few times. Great Greek food by the way.

Darren: Right. Right. Did you-

Ryan: Elin, what'd you get?

Darren: Did you get a map pack over there?

Elin: I do. Yeah. Right at the top. I have Pagoda, Black Sea and Cafe Cravings. One thing, mine-

Ryan: You've been to cafes before in Starbucks and-

Elin: I have but I'm searching on a desktop on my work computer. All I've done on this computer is work-related, so I don't know how personalized my search results will be.

Ryan: Interesting.

Darren: All right that answers our question of how Google personalizes results.

Ryan: Oh, yeah.

Darren: We're all sitting in the same room.

Ryan: That was fun.

Darren: In the same city. We all get different results likely because of personalization. What's your first organic result? Mine's Tripadvisor.

Elin: Mine's Tripadvisor.

Ryan: My first organic is Tripadvisor. The 10 best restaurants in White Bear Lake.

Elin: Yes.

Darren: Okay. All right. We do have some consistency there.

Elin: Well, and there's location too there.

Ryan: Yeah. That's where location's tied in. You're right.

Elin: Yeah.

Darren: Perfect. All right. That's good. Again, personalization is huge, along with device and location, and how that impacts rankings. Elin, what are your thoughts on paying attention to keyword rankings?

Elin: I mean, you should definitely take them with a grain of salt. It's going to depend on the market that your business serves and the location that the ranking tracker bases its keyword rankings on. If you own a local business that serves a metropolitan area and that keyword ranking tracker provides rankings for that exact metro area, then yeah, those rankings are probably pretty valid. If you own a business that serves a smaller market and your rankings are based off of that bigger metropolitan area's data, then those keyword rankings probably aren't super relevant to your business.

Ryan: That make sense--a hundred percent sense. What if you're a national brand?

Elin: I was going to turn to Darren for this one.

Darren: Hey, if you're a national brand, you have the right to follow the national rankings, but you better figure out where they're coming from and if it makes sense to your business. If you truly follow ... Because some of these sources for keyword rankings, they may provide 'national rankings' but you have to figure out how they're doing it, okay?

Ryan: Yeah.

Darren: Are they doing it with the location identifier removed from their search or are they averaging out 200 different searches from the top cities in your country?

Ryan: Nobody knows. It's just-

Darren: Right. Right. You got to figure that out. I mean, the last thing you would want is you find out that the 200 cities that are being averaged out for example, are all rural areas and you have a tendency to serve urban areas for whatever service or product you have, right?

Ryan: Yeah. On that ... And this is something I came across during this transition from the old school to the new school, is we had clients that were trying to rank nationally for certain things and that just doesn't apply anymore. For me, it's more of-- shift your focus. Don't try to focus on that number one organic ranking, because that's going to be different for Johnny in Utah and Beverly in Wisconsin. It's just going to be different across the entire country. What you can focus on is your organic traffic, is that going up and down? What kind of pages are referring traffic into you? There's different things you can focus on to see in general organically how you're doing, without trying to focus on pinpointing the number one ranking, because you can't do that anymore.

Darren: Right. Right. Have you heard of position zero?

Ryan: I have, but I want you to tell me about it.

Darren: Well, I'll tell you what. Let's talk a little bit about that, because the way Google is changing everything, they're changing their search engine results page. We mentioned it a little bit earlier when we did our little example with ‘restaurant,’ how we had a map pack and service offerings and so on and so forth. Let's dive in a little bit deeper on some of these changes to the search engine results page that is essentially causing businesses to rank in position zero. This is what everyone wants. They want to be above position one, but it may not be translated when you get those rankings if you look at them.

Let's cover a few of these features and we'll help explain why they are important and how it impacts ranking. Elin, why don't you start with featured snippets. That's a big one.

Elin: Yeah. I was also going to bring up, to your previous point, I mean, should we also touch on the fact that obviously ranking in position zero is largely beneficial to a business, but not ranking in position zero has taken away a lot of organic traffic from other businesses?

Darren: Correct.

Ryan: Yeah.

Elin: Because of that top spot.

Darren: Yep. Google is making these changes to keep people on Google properties. It's huge with flights. It's huge with recipes. It's infiltrating the car industry pretty good right now as well... where Google's is just trying to keep people on Google on properties where the end game is they're providing a great user experience, but it's killing organic traffic.

Ryan: Oh, a hundred percent. There are so many different ways that they do that and we'll touch on this in a second here. We have had clients where their organic traffic has gone down, but their revenue in their business and everything's gone up. They're like, "What gives? What's going on?" It's almost translating instead of clicking on that organic link, they're getting their business information on position zero, which is actually better for them. Like you were saying, you can't track that in a report.

Darren: They aren't getting the click.

Ryan: Yeah. They aren't getting the click so you can't see that metric. Yeah. I'm sorry to cut you off, Elin. Dive into featured snippets. I want to hear what you have to say about this.

Elin: Oh no, you're fine. Yeah. A featured snippet is a block that appears at the very top of a search results page. It usually appears in response to a question that could either be explicitly stated or implied by the user, in the search again with that personalization. It usually includes a brief answer that's taken from a webpage that Google thinks is the most relevant to that search.

Normally, the answer comes from pages that are already ranking in the top five organic positions on Google, but it can also be pulled from lower ranking webpages. Again, just in accordance with what Google thinks is most relevant to that user and their search.

Ryan: To clarify, this is all just question-related for most of the featured snippets. If we have a client that wants to cut trees down and they have a ranking for, how much does it cost to cut down an elm tree? Instead of them ranking organically, they might take that snippet and put it up in the featured snippet as an answer. Is that what you're saying?

Elin: True. Yeah I mean, it could be someone could search a question directly in that search bar or again, if it's implied, someone could search “cost of cutting down an elm tree” and then that answer is there in position zero.

Ryan: Okay.

Darren: It's not limited to texts. If there's a video result, that's best. “How to sharpen your chainsaw?”

Elin: Yeah.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

Darren: Google will happily throw a video in the results.

Elin: True. Videos have been-

Ryan: A YouTube video. Yes.

Elin: Videos have been given preference in featured snippets as well. Having that on your webpage gives you a higher chance of getting that top spot on the search results page. Featured snippets are also more likely to be included in a mobile search result than on desktop, just again, to help the mobile users.

Ryan: Was it like 5% of the time or was it higher than that? Because I know I see it sometimes. You search for something and you're like, "Oh, there's the answer right there."

Elin: Yeah. I think it definitely depends on the search, but yeah, I mean, from January to April of 2020, this year, about 10% of all search queries made on mobile devices in the U.S. returned a featured snippet. While only about 4.4% of searches included a featured snippet on desktop.

Ryan: Wow, that's two and a half times as much. Cool. I didn't know it was that much.

Elin: Yeah.

Darren: Another feature, the three pack or the local pack, right?

Ryan: Yup.

Darren: You've seen those. We've all seen them. Sometimes called the local finder. It shows up when the query implies that you're looking for something local. If you're looking for a bakery, another place of business, you'd normally get that three pack right there for you. Top three options. It also consists of a map. The map has pins on it to indicate where the local businesses are. Then obviously the name, the physical address, phone number, website link, et cetera.

If you're on a mobile device, it'll normally have a click-to-call button instead of the website link. Businesses are appearing in the local pack and they were ranked because of the searcher's geographic location and their intent. Again, if you search something general like bakery, your business, if you're the bakery owner, you could be getting that top click, but it's not counting in your rankings because you're position zero, similar to the three-pack. What about images, Ryan?

Ryan: The images. Okay. Well, images. All right. Let me see if I can unpack this in my brain here. I'll put this in developer speak. The image pack will appear as a visual aid. If Google thinks what you're searching for can be answered with an image and it's beneficial to show you the image to answer your question, then likely an image pack will show up. Typically, it's that horizontal carousel, which means you can swipe left and right to view more images if you want. It can be positioned anywhere on the search results page.

Sometimes it's two or three rolls of images instead. For example, we just talked about cutting down a Dutch elm tree. Well, if somebody is like, "I don't know if I need to cut it down or not." They ask their search engine, "What does Dutch elm disease look like?" They might say, "Oh, I can actually answer with a picture because they're wondering what it looks like." They might be shown an image pack. That's just one example of many that can happen.

But the image pack is basically when you're searching for something and Google thinks, "I can answer with an image." They show you this image pack. It's a way to surprisingly get a decent amount of traffic to your site. It shines a bright light on something that is often neglected on every website that we see and that's called the alt tag. If anybody's been around websites for long enough, they know what an alt tag is. An alt tag is a little tag that you can put on any image on your website that tells search engines what it is.

It's an alternative description for what it is. If you have your alt tags in line and they're in check, you might have a chance for showing up in an image pack and getting a little bit extra traffic without realizing it. That's a little pro tip for today. That's kind of neat. With those horizontal carousels, there's a lot of different things you can do. You can do related questions, top stories, and a bunch of other things. Elin, what do you know about top stories?

Elin: Yeah. Top stories. The top stories feature appears as a block of three cards composed of articles that, again, Google deems most relevant to the search. Each card includes a thumbnail image, headline and source. It typically shows in the top half of the first results page and usually only displays stories from legitimate news sources. I did find something interesting. I'm not sure exactly when this change was made, but top stories used to only include sources from Google News.

Those were sites that were generally bigger and included in that Google News. I don't have the exact date, but Google did expand top stories to include sources, or to include more sources. Stories can come from smaller websites. They still are generally seen as legitimate news sources, but they did expand that to include stories from different sources and not just the New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera.

Ryan: Makes sense. We've covered so much. The featured snippets that you talked about earlier that can, more or less, answer a question. Darren, you hit on local, when you might hit a local pack. And somebody wants a search result that might have an image-- I talked about that. You're talking about something separate from all those, which is my search query can be answered with a news story.

Elin: True. Yes. Correct.

Ryan: Like, what's the latest on the COVID relief package or whatever? That's more relevant to a news story versus just, what does Dutch elm look like?

Elin: I mean, again with that personalization, I mean, you could just type in “coronavirus” and your top result could be a news article on latest developments or-

Ryan: Ah, okay. That makes sense.

Darren: Yeah. It's all what the algorithm thinks that you're looking for.

Elin: Yeah.

Darren: If you have maybe in the near-term, a lot of history of looking up specific newsworthy events, they may throw that top stories feature in.

Elin: Or if you read the news often.

Darren: Yep.

Ryan: Yep.

Darren: Yep. A feature that I like is people also ask. The expandable questions.

Ryan: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Darren: Right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Darren: It's obviously related to your search query that you put in and it's normally a set of two to four questions that are related. As you click on each one of those featured questions, two or three more appear, and the more you click, the more that appear. Basically, it's this ever expanding list of questions that are related to your original query. What we're seeing a lot is, is that people also ask is appearing 50% higher than featured snippets triggered for the same queries.

Ryan: Do you ever see those and then you're just like, "Gosh, I should have asked it that way." You think other people asked it better than you would have asked Google?

Darren: Oh, yeah. Without question. It's like an endless rabbit hole too because you keep seeing what people are asking, right? These are more frequent on mobile devices. That's something to keep in mind. Since just a few months ago, since September, people also ask are showing up more commonly in brand knowledge panels. Appearing about 9% more of the time compared to 1% prior to that.

What I mean by this, these brand knowledge panels, if you're a large corporation, let's say Target, for example, the people also ask feature will show up and maybe one of those first few questions will be, is Target open? Or, what's the CEO's name at Target? Just common queries that also are associated with it.

Ryan: Okay. That's interesting.

Darren: We probably won't see it for small businesses, just because the volume isn't there, but as it relates to brands and brand knowledge panels, the people also ask feature is showing up a lot more for those brand searches.

Ryan: Interesting. Oh, what else you got? We've hit on so many position zero things. I know you got a couple more up your sleeve, Darren.

Darren: Well, do you want to talk about videos? We already talked about images.

Ryan: Oh, like ... Well, it's a carousel

Darren: Tell us about videos.

Ryan: I already talked about image carousels. I could talk about video carousel as well. It's pretty similar.

Darren: Sure. Touch on it quickly.

Ryan: I'll touch on it quickly. It's pretty similar but instead it's showing an image to your results. Like you hit on earlier, a video could best serve your answer. I grew up fixing my own cars. That's what I did. I think anybody that's listening to this that likes to turn a wrench has watched something on YouTube to fix something. If I'm like, "Hey, how do I replace the alternator or even change a battery or headlight or something like that?" If I ask any of those questions in a search engine, among the first results I get is a video carousel. There's a couple of different options of videos I can select to watch how to do these things. If there's a query that Google thinks is best shown to you by video, and that'll answer your question, it'll show you this video pack. I'm sure everybody has seen it before. That's basically the quick answer to that, but I-

Darren: Yep. A lot of ‘how to’ searches.

Ryan: A lot of how to, yep. There's a lot of how to. That's the majority of it, I guess I would say, for sure.

Darren: Okay. Good. Good.

Ryan: Yeah. That was a good one. You got anything else?

Elin: All right. We've got one more. This is the last one we're going to talk about. It's the knowledge panel, which is a pretty big one.

Darren: A big one.

Elin: Yes. I think the easiest way to describe the knowledge panel is that it's like a mini Wikipedia page on the search results page. I mean, it can show information about businesses, people, animals, places. Anything there's a Wikipedia page for, you could probably see a knowledge panel for on Google. It's a very dynamic feature and so the content changes depending on what you're searching for. I mean, there could be text, images, ratings, reviews, social profiles. Anything else that's relevant to that query on that topic could be there in the knowledge panel.

The knowledge panels are automatically generated by Google. The information that appears comes from various sources that Google pulls in to create this page. As a business, you may be wondering if there's any way you can control this information that's there on the knowledge panel.

Ryan: Oh, for sure.

Elin: One thing you can do is to claim your Google My Business profile, and then keep it up to date. That's where you enter your business hours, information, what you do, where you serve. Then Google can use that information to pull it into a knowledge panel. Other than that, that's really the only control that anyone has over the information that is chosen to go into that.

Ryan: Is that where you've seen businesses get tripped up before because, "Oh, I'll make a My Business page." Then they just let it mothball and sit for six months and then they're wondering why stuff's not working? You've probably seen that in your line of work before?

Elin: Yeah. That's especially frustrating as a user too. I got pretty frustrated the other day. I wanted to go to a store and clearly this business hadn't checked their Google My Business profile in a while, especially with coronavirus right now. I mean, hours are different. Some places are closed. You never really know. Their Google My Business profile said they were open and I drove there, and they were not. It's really frustrating, I think for users especially, if businesses don't keep that profile up to date because it's position zero. If someone does a quick search, it's the first thing they see and it's right there. If that information isn't accurate, then it's pretty frustrating.

Darren: That information that you talked about in the knowledge panel, the information in the local pack, that image pack, the video pack, the featured snippets, if your business ranks for any of those features, you really don't have a ranking, right? Because you're position zero.

Ryan: Technically, you don't have a trackable ranking.

Darren: Right. You don't have a trackable ranking. Point being is, if you're going to put a lot of weight into your keyword rankings, you better know where you're coming in, right? These are all positions zero, which aren't tracked by all these great tools that a lot of people subscribe to, which we subscribe to them as well, but we've just got to be careful of how much weight we put into them.

Ryan: Yeah. That's why I said they're basically worthless.

Darren: Right. Right. Let's say you're an HVAC company. I just searched for ‘HVAC repair,’ right?

Ryan: Sure.

Darren: If you're an HVAC company, you want to be ranking for that, right?

Ryan: Yep.

Darren: That's a huge keyword for anyone in the HVAC repair world. When I did that, a local pack is displayed and I can go directly to any of the businesses in that local pack. Below, the local pack was ... well, there was a people also ask section, which we talked about. Then there was the organic results. You know who came in number one for HVAC repair when I did this search?

Ryan: I'm curious.

Darren: Angie's List. Right?

Ryan: Okay.

Darren: Now, I'm guessing all the marketing people at Angie's List are sitting there looking at their rankings, going, "All right. We ranked number one." Right? Well, one thing I didn't mention is not only above Angie's List--so we had the people also ask, we had the local pack, but there were six paid links and a total of seven search engine results features all above that first organic result.

If you're in marketing at Angie's List and you're pretty proud of yourself that you're ranking number one, when you actually do the search yourself, you find out that there's 13 clickable options before the user gets to you, what does that mean? You know?

Ryan: Yep.

Darren: What's that mean for that keyword ranking? You probably don't feel as good about it.

Ryan: It's still ... Yeah.

Darren: I mean, it's relevant. I'd be proud to be ranking number one organically. But in the context of it, you're the 14th link on the page.

Elin: Yeah. I mean, most users probably won't even reach that listing or link.

Darren: Right. Right. Right. Are users going to get to ya? Are they going to see ya? Angie's List marketing department can tell their CEO, "Hey, we're ranking number one." In reality, how many people are actually clicking on that link?

Ryan: Yeah. This whole discussion, you could go to any business and say, "Your organic traffic is going to be down and your organic keyword rankings are going to be squat, but your business could go way up."

Darren: Right.

Ryan: It's all about you manage ‘position zero’ and manage your presence on Google and keep up with your Google My Business page and all sorts of other things. It's a weird thing for businesses to think about here that, "Hey, my organic rankings might tank completely and my organic traffic even on my website, that might go down, but my business could still be going up." That's just the way Google has shifted and the way things are going nowadays. It's a weird thing, but I'm glad we unpacked that a little bit.

Darren: Yep. That's all we have for today. Hope you enjoyed our discussion and hope that we shedded some light on keyword rankings, what they mean.

Ryan: What they don't mean.

Darren: What they don't mean and everything else.