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Rank Tracking – SEO’s Best Friend

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By now you should know that SEO is a process and that it takes time. It also is an effort that you will tweak and alter as you go. You may start out down one path and then veer off towards another – that’s perfectly acceptable. The one golden rule, however, is if you don’t know where you’ve been its hard to know where you’re going! You’ve got to track, track and track some more in order to measure your progress and to evaluate what is and what is not working.

When it comes to rank tracking there are a few things that you should be doing and one very important thing that you should not be doing – obsessing. Tracking your rank for each keyword is vital and you should be doing it as part of a well structured SEO campaign. However, you can easily get obsessed with the numbers and start spending way too much time on them as well land that is not productive.

Here’s a quick list of the do’s and don’ts of rank tracking…

Rank Tracking Do’s…

• Setup Weekly Reports – Weekly is good enough, don’t fall into the trap of wasting time every day on this.


• Archive the Reports – You need to be able to look at historical data, so make sure you save it or are using a program that does that for you.


• Pick 2 Sets Of Keywords – Your primary keywords that you are doing your SEO work on and then a larger set that you periodically monitor as well just to get a sense of the overall direction of the site. We will typically have 4 to 10 keywords in the primary set and maybe 100 to 200 in the secondary. We’re not that concerned with the secondary large set, it is just used to get a feel for the overall direction of rankings on the site as a whole. As authority for the site increases, you’ll see rankings pick up site wide and this larger set is usual for that analysis.


• Re-Evaluate – Go over your keyword strategy every 60 days and reexamine your choices. Make sure to consider other options and to correlate your suspicions and findings with analytical data (Google Analytics, for example).

Rank Tracking Don’ts…

• Track Daily – You will see too many fluctuations and likely get caught up in it too much and waste too much time. If you’ve got a program that does it automatically and you want to, go ahead, but be cautious to not get diverted too much.


• Put On Blinders – Sometimes you have a desire to chase a certain keyword, but it’s just “not happening”. You’ve got to be open to look at what Google is “giving” you and don’t try to force things. If you’re getting placements on other keywords, go with that – or at least look at it. The same is true with URLs. Often times you target one URL but another is ranking. Make sure to reexamine your choices – sometimes those that we covet are not the best keywords to chase and we can easily get tunnel vision and fixate on them.


• Lose Track of the Big Picture – You’ve got to remember that rankings are simply a means to an end which is sales and conversions. So don’t get obsessive about rankings at the cost of conversions.

What We Do

There are lots of rank tracking software programs on the market today. Some are hosted plans that you subscribe to on a monthly fee basis and others are local tools that you purchase and run yourself. We use the latter. A monthly subscription program may suit your needs, but for us we find them far too limiting. They tend to be very restrictive on the number of keywords you can track, etc… and if you go wide open with them they get very expensive on a monthly basis. They also tend to be more controlling about the data and we like to have the data to play with ourselves. Keep in mind, we do SEO for clients as well and so we have tons of keywords we’re tracking and reporting on, so our needs are not necessarily the same as yours.

New Rank Tracker Review…

We have just completed a new review of Rank Tracker. As always it is complete and in-depth with lots of good video information as well – enjoy…

We have used many programs but in the end have settled with Rank Tracker by SEO PowerSuite. It has an incredible amount of features and I won’t try to go into all of them here. But here’s the short list of our favorite features:

• It can be scheduled and automated to run one or all of your reports daily, weekly, or whatever other schedule you want to put in place.


• It is extremely simple to administer and, more importantly, customize. You can very easily modify the reports and screens to your own needs.


• Supports “notes” at the keyword level. This is an awesome option that allows us to track certain aspects of a client project via notations and then sort or filter by those notations.


• It support software proxies so you can get fast results and for lots of keywords without getting IP bans from Google. Again, not important for most, but HUGE for us tracking thousands of keywords for all of our sites and client sites.


• Direct data export to TXT, CSV (for Excel) or even SQL statements so that you can directly insert into a database. This is really powerful. They approach this with the mentality that “the data is yours – how can best give it to you” – I love that approach! All of the reports and exports are all user customizable – great stuff.


• Tons of other features, including keyword research that rivals some of the best tools out there. They can even pull in keywords from the Google Suggests lists – very good stuff…

Another tool that we sometimes use is the Rank Tracker module inside of Market Samurai. Now, keep in mind, Market Samurai is not on the same level as Rank Tracker. It is a multi-purpose tool and does many, many other things – primarily keyword research and competitor SEO analysis. However, the Rank Tracking module of Market Samurai has some very nice features that the current version of Rank Tracker does not support (I have spoken with support and they assure me the next version will). For example:

• It allows you to track multiple domains in one project. This is very cool for some of our clients who have many, many domains and feeder sites all tracking after the same keywords. We can put in a list of the keywords and a list of the domains and Market Samurai will track it all.


• Tracking of double listings. Market Samurai will show you multiple returns for the keyword. So if you’ve got a URL ranking at position #6 that you’re trying to get better rankings you may find that you have another URL sitting at position #14 as well that is a potential candidate for a double listing. This is a very nice feature.

Overall, we mostly use Rank Tracker, but we do some supplementary work with Samurai as well. We’ve found, however, that Samurai can be a bit off on the results and miss a lot of stuff. But in general, it’s a solid option.

As always, there are free options that you can use or you can just track in the browser window and log the results yourself. That, however, is not recommended. Google uses personalization settings and can show you better results that everyone else which will be very misleading. You also have to understand that there are many data centers and tracking in a browser window is highly suspect. A better option if you’re going the free route is to look at Rank Tracker by the SEO Book guys. It integrates with their toolbar and is fairly easy to use. The problem with all of the free routes is that they don’t have many options nor do they do a very good job of preserving your data, presenting it via charts, etc…

The most important approach, however, is to keep it simple and be consistent in your tracking so that you can monitor your progress. You will have peaks and valleys. There will be times when despite your work your rankings just go down every day. But you’ve got to keep at it and plow through those times. With historical data that process becomes easier because you can look at the trends in the past and realize that “hey, I’ve seen this before, just gotta keep marching forward”.

The data can “show” you that and it is enlightening. Look, for example, at the growth of this keyword below:

As you can see, there are many “peaks” and “valleys” along the way. Many are actually cut off this chart as it is only showing the past six months of progress and is also only looking at the top 50 positions. But you can see that your results will bounce around – that is common – but with sustained effort you’ll see them continue to climb – even if slowly.

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Tags: Google Rank, Rank Checking, Rank Tracker Review, Rank Tracking, SERP Results, Site Ranking, Website Ranking