Rankings are not that worthless, they are only worthless in isolation. Without rankings you can not expect people find your services.

But I completely agree with the main topic of this well written post - goals and ROI are a true measure of the online success.

Rankings are still valuable, especially when combined with traffic data etc.
But as a SEO metric for succes, rankings only are just not enough.

But the real issue for me is that, as flawed as rankings are, they are still the best metric we have. Measuring traffic or any of the traffic related measures in the original post as an absolute metric is way more flawed than rankings, because it takes no account of seasonality, or general growth in internet traffic. One of our clients ranked really well and got a lot of traffic for search terms like "Christmas gift" in December, but in January it dried up - so we must have really screwed up their SEO, right? Perhaps traffic metrics as a twelve month moving average have some merit. I don't think any one metric will ever be enough though, unless someone can figure out how to measure the exact proportion of all the relevant clicks out there you actually got. If anyone knows how to do that and hasn't yet figured out how to make themselves very rich from the knowledge then please get in touch!

"As a measure of SEO success; CHECKING YOUR RANKS using automated rank checkers is meaningless". - Wouldn't it be easier to just check it yourself? For each website you will never truly know what is going on with it but with ranking, you can measure what works and how effective your site is working.

”You need something like a zero measurement to start with. What is my ranking, traffic, keywords and conversion at point zero.” I completely agree, you must start from the beginning and work your way up.

Organic rankings are good from the branding point of view. Automated rank checkers are useful but you need to be more aggressive while depending on software manual approach is the best approach.

Cheers.
Promotion Ranking

A question for you. Similar to your blog, I'm using both categories and tags as two ways of structuring content. To prevent duplicate content, which should I prevent from being indexed by google, Tags or Categories? Thx a million.

Your second paragraph says it all: "It [rank checking] is one of a number of stats that you can use to generally see how things are moving along". The value of rankings doesn't go further than that: a general overview of how things are moving along. Use more detailed and more meaningful metrics than rankings to determine your SEO succes.