Google: You Can’t Tell Which SEO Efforts Led To Ranking Success

John Mueller from Google shared something both funny and mostly true about SEO tasks. He basically said that it is often hard or even sometimes impossible to know which SEO tasks led to ranking success, even after it is all set and done. John said on Twitter “you can’t even tell afterwards” which SEO tasks worked or not.

I’ve been writing about the SEO space for over 18 years now, and watching it for maybe over 21 years now. There is a lot of truth to that statement. You can put 10 SEOS on a single project and each SEO can claim that their tactic was why the site had SEO success. One guy worked on schema, one gal worked on speed, another bot worked on alt tags, etc etc. Truth is, probably they all had some small effect to have some larger result.

The set of tweets is a good one, let me share it:

Partially it’s also just that prioritizing SEO efforts is super hard, takes a lot of experience, and requires that you take leaps of faith sometimes. It’s easy to find 100 things to do for SEO, but which one is the right one to focus on right now? You can’t even tell afterwards.

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 15, 2021

You can see the frustration one SEO has around some SEOs just throwing SEO at the wall and then waiting to see what sticks. John responded that for many, “prioritizing SEO efforts is super hard, takes a lot of experience, and requires that you take leaps of faith sometimes. It’s easy to find 100 things to do for SEO, but which one is the right one to focus on right now.” Very true – but often, you need to do the 100 things these days and doing the one thing is rarely going to give you a win – that is unless the site’s title tags all say homepage or the pages can’t be indexed – like big SEO mistakes.

Some things are easy: fixing a technically broken site & seeing it rank is an obvious win. But for the rest, is a 10% improvement a sign you did the right thing? or could the other have resulted in +50%?

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 15, 2021

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In any event, I thought you’d all like these tweets.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update:

Well, not exactly. It was more about prioritization.

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) December 16, 2021

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