With search engine optimization (SEO) as competitive as it is today the last thing smart, savvy, and strategic marketers should be focusing on are “vanity metrics” that have no concrete basis in reality.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of SEO “gurus” and marketing agencies out there promoting their own vanity metrics (sometimes not even disclosing that they are proprietary metrics) as the be-all, end-all of search engine optimization guideposts – causing well-intentioned entrepreneurs and marketers to waste a lot of time, energy, and effort focusing on metrics that aren’t going to help them optimize their campaigns at all.

Even worse is that there are so many legitimate search engine optimization experts in the industry today that really hone in on these vanity metrics, talking about them on social media, in dedicated forums, and even in their own courses and programs and giving them a lot of legitimacy they really don’t need.

Here it is straight from the horse’s mouth:

Below we highlight some of the myths and misconceptions revolving around these vanity metrics, illustrating how dangerous they can be to pay attention to – especially if you’re ignoring other, key metrics at the same time – and giving you the inside insight into the core metrics that actually act as signposts for your success in the world of SEO.

The Myths And Misconceptions Of “Vanity Metrics”

Right out of the gate, it’s critical to remember that the overwhelming majority of metrics like Domain Authority, Domain Rank, Trust Flow, and almost all of the other vanity metrics out there are nothing more than marketing tools designed to give influence, authority, and credibility to these search engine agencies or platforms.

Sure, a lot of these vanity metrics can give you a ballpark idea of how well (or not) your search engine optimization campaigns are going. But they’ll never be able to give you better than a ballpark idea, never giving you the specificity you need to actually optimize your SEO efforts.

All that effort you spend in boosting your “domain authority” or cranking up your “domain rank” is effort that you could have spent focusing on things that actually increase your search engine positioning.

Google Doesn’t Care About Domain Authority

As highlighted a moment ago, it can be useful to get a ballpark idea of whether or not your search engine optimization efforts are trending in the right direction or even moving the needle at all.

At the same time, you need to remember that Google NEVER discloses (at least not intentionally) what you need to do to better optimize your search engine efforts and they certainly aren’t focused on things like domain authority.

The last thing Google search engine engineers care about is tailoring their algorithm to focus on something the folks at Moz or Majestic have come up with, so stop looking at these numbers as they are your business credit score.

Metrics That Can Easily Be Manipulated Mean (Next To) Nothing

All you have to do is look at a place like Fiverr, a platform absolutely flooded with so-called search engine optimization experts promising to give you Trust Flow 15+ for just five dollars (or less), to know that these metrics really aren’t worth all that much time or effort paying attention to.

When you have “SEO experts” all over the world promising to boost your TF score almost instantly – and actually having the capability to do so – you know that the scores can be easily manipulated, making them next to useless for deep analytics or serious optimization efforts.

Almost all of these metrics are built entirely on top of data sets only accessible by platforms like Moz Site Explorer and SEM Rush.

If these sites don’t have access to the proprietary data that you as a website or web platform owner have, and cannot see all of the SEO tools, technology, and tactics you are putting into play, how could they possibly have a complete picture of whether or not your efforts are working?

Zeroing In On The Details That Actually Matter

At the end of the day, you would be much better served in the world of search engine optimization paying attention to details that actually matter – details such as backlinks relevance and the metrics you’re getting from something like the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Dashboard.

By all means use the proprietary vanity metrics we highlighted above to sort of cross reference these core metrics and make sure that everything is trending in the same direction so that you know how to best proceed moving forward, but keep in mind, just because you have great “DA” score doesn’t mean you website performs well within the search engines.

When you get right down to it, the reality is that the world of search engine optimization is far more competitive and far more complex than any vanity metrics could ever hope to encompass all on their own.

Combine that with the fact that these proprietary services providing these metrics don’t have access to the actual data that matters (simply because Google and other major search engine networks don’t release it to the public) and it’s easy to see why these reverse engineered solutions frequently come up short.

Focus on relevance when running your search engine optimization campaign instead of chasing “guesstimate” metrics from SEO tools.