Search Engine Land recently published an interesting article on the subject of click-through rates and search engine optimization. Citing two studies from the past two years, the article finds that there are fundamental disagreements about whether a site’s CTR affects its ranking in search engines at all.

The article’s conclusion is quite correct, and it constitutes meaningful advice for any of our competing Los Angeles SEO companies: “It isn’t worth your time to consider CTR as a ranking factor.”

But we would go further than this, and we would even venture to guess that some Los Angeles SEO companies would stubbornly resist the conclusion. The disagreements highlighted in the article seem to suggest that even the most educated and rigorous SEO professionals don’t have a definitive understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes of search engine algorithms.

If those algorithms were transparent, there would be no need for the discussion of whether or not CTR affects ranking. But since they are not transparent, they render those discussions – in Search Engine Land’s words – a waste of time. And yet it is a waste of time that some lesser SEO companies will continue to pursue, on the basis of wanting to uncover tricks that will let them promise quick rankings to their clients, whether or not those rankings will stand the test of time.

But fortunately for SEO companies that are willing to look past the desire for quick returns, the real secret to successful SEO doesn’t depend on tricks. Rather, it depends on continual efforts to make site content better and to build an overall marketing and social media strategy that will provide clients with better ranking, click-through rates, and all other important indicators.