Goodbye SERP’s Hello SMERP’s

For me,  Search Engine Result Pages and Search Engine Site Position Reports are dead. I could really care less that non branded term keywords you think are important come up position one for you. And for those companies that espouse the virtues of their wonderful SEO working their magical powers to gain position one, seriously?

Traffic, stone cold traffic. Show me you increased traffic to my site for the keywords that make me money and then we can have a real conversation. Big misses that I see all the time are not just traffic from head terms but all the increase in concatenation from the head terms that are also driving traffic and conversions.

Show me that concatenated search terms increased, show me that the great content I have produced increased not just search traffic but referral traffic [organic link acquisition indicators] and then we can talk about you getting paid as an SEO “hexpert”.

So what is this thing I am calling a SMERP? My new acronym refers to Search Media Engine Realtime Page. I am so over text as the primary indicator. Lets get results reports infused with Images, Video, Audio and  Locations as part of the conversation.

Websites and citizen journalists are not indexed on text alone anymore and a results page is now inclusive of everything under the sun including realtime social context.

Search results: now to muck it all up is the personalization aspect of any search. Am I logged into a social site that morphs my results based on my friends and the social graph? If I am basing my SEO on traffic and not position then the conversation is now a moot point.

All together now, the keyword position is no longer the success metric. Traffic from keywords, content  and thematically relevant mixed media/channel relations are.

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