How To Check Your Search Engine Rankings
Search ranking reports are critical to any SEO campaign. With search ranking reports you can track the progress of your SEO work and find insights into ways you can increase your search traffic even more.
The primary way most people track the results of search engine optimization is by running search ranking reports. These reports tell you where your website is currently ranking in the major search engines for your targeted keywords. The reports themselves don’t affect your rankings, but they do give you insight into the effect of the work you have done and what areas you may need to improve on.
Let’s say when you first started the optimization process, you decided to target some less competitive keywords because your website was new and you wanted to start getting more website traffic as soon as possible.
As part of your plan, you targeted those keywords with both the on-page optimization as well as the link building. As you were doing this, you ran search ranking reports regularly and tracked the results of the work. After a few months, the reports indicate that your website is now in the top results for all those keywords. This tells you not only that what you’re doing is working, but also that you can now start targeting new keywords with the link building. You may want to continue to target the old keywords with a small percentage of your link building to maintain the high ranking for those keywords, but you know that you can now start targeting more competitive keywords to bring in more traffic to your website.
Conversely, as you run reports to track your results, you may find that your website is slipping in the rankings for some keywords. This information will let you know that you either lost some of the optimization of the pages targeting these keywords when editing your website or you need to do some additional link building targeting the keywords. Without running the reports, you wouldn’t know this and would be working blindly.
Recommendations:
There are several search ranking reporting software options available right now which can automate this process for you. If you are tracking more than handful of keywords, I highly recommend getting the software. Most software options also have the added benefit of a scheduler, so you don’t even have to always remember to run the reports.
Right now a good choice for anyone is Advanced Web Ranking. They have a good product and good support and you can run reports for just about any search engine in any country. For churches, I think this is the only software that I’d recommend because they have a local search engine feature that allows you to enter your city (and the surrounding cities) and then run reports in the local search engines like Google Places, Bing Business Portals and even sites like Citysearch and Yelp.
I recommend running reports at least once a month.
In addition to running search ranking reports, you should also track your link building. In our next article we’ll look at some ways to track your link building campaigns.
What do you think?
How often do you run ranking reports?
What do you use to run search ranking reports?
