Eric Siu argues that ranking first for a keyword means nothing if it doesn't drive business. He emphasizes understanding customer intent and search volume, and shares how his early site lightshowvideos.com got traffic but made no money because he ignored commercial intent.
I didn't think about the business. Rankings are nice, but you have to make sure that they drive business at the end of the day because who cares if you rank number 1 for a keyword? One of my first websites was lightshowvideos.com because I used to go to a lot of EDM festivals. I ranked number 1 for the keyword light show videos and I was like, man, you know, I've made it. But it's not like much traffic came in. And even if traffic came in, it wasn't high-intent traffic. I really was just creating just to create. I didn't think about the customer intent. I didn't think about the customers at all. I didn't think about the business model that I was trying to create. I'm just like, I'm going to just try to rank number 1 for this keyword. And so you have to understand the why behind it. You have to understand the intent behind it, and you have to understand if there's volume or not behind these keywords.
