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SEO Baselines & Rank Tracking – All The Boring Stuff You Gotta Do

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SEO is part art and part science. Most of what we do as practitioners of SEO is simple science in action – author x amount of articles, distribute to y amount of directories, every z days. However, there is also a part of it which is just not completely known because ultimately we don’t know the real rules to the game that we’re trying to play (see our recent blog post on Google’s latest algorithm changes.)

We try to test and evaluate, observe and learn, adapt and improve – that’s the nature of this game. When you’re in a situation where you just don’t have ultimate control over the outcome, you need to isolate that and really focus on all of the things that you can control – process of elimination, reduce the variables. To do so, there are a few guidelines you should follow.

• Create A Baseline
• Track Your Progress
• Analyze Your Results
• Make Appropriate Changes in Strategy
• Wash, Rinse and Repeat

The point is you want to keep everything you can control in order, so that you make some good decisions about the outcomes of your SEO campaigns and their effectiveness. This truly is one of the biggest mistakes that most people doing SEO make – they fail to master the “process” of SEO, the “psychology” of SEO – and in so doing they just fly by the seat of their pants. Not a good recipe for success.

So let’s dive into these steps one at a time and break them down.

Create A Baseline

So, what is a baseline you ask? Well, if you’re trying to get somewhere you need to know where you started and where you are along the journey at any given point in time. A baseline is simply a set of metrics that we use to track our performance.

Now, I’m going to suggest several different indicators that we use for creating baselines. It is important that you realize that NONE of them are 100% accurate – and that’s okay. Accuracy is really not what we’re concerned with here. What we’re looking for is the “deltas” – the changes – over time. Trend analysis. Are we going up? Are we going down? Where were we last month and where are we headed this month?

SEO is a long term process – we say that in virtually every post we right for a reason – you need to believe it and internalize it. If you’re thinking this is a 30 day gig, or even a 90 day gig, well, save yourself the time, money, and frustration and just stop now. So, if you’re still with me, then you need to realize that along this route you’re gonna get frustrated at times when you’re not getting the desired results. Times like that, you really need some numbers to look at to put everything into perspective. Numbers don’t lie and so you can see where you’ve really come and the progress that you’ve made. That’s important.

You can pick other indicators to you on your monthly baseline, but these are the ones that we would suggest. As I said above, this should be a monthly process. Every month take 10 minutes and update these numbers. The best way to do it would be just to put it in an Excel spreadsheet. If you have more than one site, you should be doing this for every site.

• Log the PR (page rank) of your site and any key pages which you are tracking – but generally just the homepage is fine.
• Log the page and domain links as reported by Yahoo explorer to your homepage (note – seobook’s tool bar for Firefox makes this a breeze).
• Log the values for external links, referring domains, and pages as reported by MajesticSEO.com (you only need a free account).
• Log the Alexa Traffic Rank, US Traffic Rank and SLI (sites linking in).
• Log the SEMRush.com Rank, Google SE Traffic and the number of SEMRush Keywords
• Log the key metrics from Google Analytics for your site selecting the previous months data – visitors, pageviews, time on site, pages per visit, % new visitors, bounce rate and one other one that I like to track is the number of keywords you were found for via search. This number is great to show you your “keyword penetration” into your niche.
• If you’ve got a list, and you really should be building one (need to do a blog post about that), then you should also track the number of people on your list each month.
• If you have other goals that have numeric values and are easily tracked, make them a part of your baseline. For example, if you want to commit to writing one post a day for your blog, then track the total number of blog posts.

It seems like a lot, but really this will take you all of about 10 minutes to gather. I recommend putting it into an Excel spreadsheet with the metrics down the left column and the months across the top. This way you can just fill in a new column of data each month for tracking purposes.

Track Your Progress

I’m not sure who said it, but there is a quote that sticks in my mind that says “that which you track, you improve”. It’s part of the human psyche – the way we work. The very act of tracking your progress causes you to actively think about better solutions – it’s a win-win proposition. However, you can’t get carried away here and trust me, it is easy to do, so as a rule don’t check your keyword rankings more than once a week. If you start doing it daily you’re just wasting time that should be better spent getting links. It can become paralyzing in and of itself, so don’t fall into that trap (see Rank Tracking – SEO’s Best Friend).

Now, there are lots of freebie solutions for Rank Tracking, so feel free to find one that works. Personally we use SEO Powersuite’s Rank Tracker because it is worth every penny. I need to go back and update its review, because they have added a ton of great new features to it in the past month or two such as direct visit integration with your Google Analytics account and tracking of your competitors rankings along with your own – great stuff. Rank Tracker can be setup to automatically run, gather the rankings, create reports and even directly export to SQL so you can import the results right into a database if you like. If you can’t spare the cash for Rank Tracker, take a look at the SEObook Rank Tracker freebie. It’s super simplistic and not the most accurate, but it’s decent for a freebie.

I recommend you start simple with rank tracking and just track about 10 to 30 keywords. You can always expand your efforts over time, but you don’t want the very task of tracking to “enslave” you. We track several thousand keywords, but we have it all automated. We have a dedicated cloud server running the software 24/7, 100 proxies configured so we can pull down all of the data without getting Google IP bans, etc… trust me – simple is good!

As far as a schedule goes, you should track your keywords once a week – no more unless you’ve got it automated. If you use Rank Tracker you don’t need to worry about this, but if you’re doing it on your own, you should probably again create an Excel spreadsheet to log the progress. Put your keywords down the left column and the date across the top and update it once a week. Try to be consistent about this, so pick a day and time of the week that you can commit to.

Analyze Your Results

Well this is pretty obvious, but now you have some meaningful data in front of you to make some evaluations on. Be careful, however, not to be short sited. With rankings, everything depends on your site first. Is it new? Is it aged? Is it a PR0 site? Or a PR5 site? Those factors will determine what type of progress you should expect.

If you have a brand new site, listen, you’ve got to put in your dues, so just accept that going in. You’re not going to get a brand new site ranking in any short order. Anymore, it’s hard to make much progress on a new site in less than 90 to 120 days and that’s if you do everything right. Make some dumb mistakes along the way, and you can hurt that timeline significantly. So be patient and don’t rush things.

If you’re trying out a new link building service for example, you need to give it 90 days to really test it out. What happens is that when you start SEO on keywords that haven’t had much work done on them, you can see a lot of bouncing around and it will take some time to stabilize (see Google Bounce? Or Keyword Maturity?).

Make Appropriate Changes in Strategy

Use the data in front of you wisely, but keep in mind this data is not “fresh”. Most of the data you get online will be 60 days or more out of date. Another reason that you have to be patient with SEO – the data itself will lag by a couple of months, so if you quit after 30 days, what valid conclusions could you have possibly made? But, let’s say you’ve been doing your baselines religiously for three months now and you’re not seeing your Majestic Referring Domains count increase. That is an indicator that perhaps it’s time for a new tool. If you’ve been using the same submitter or network service, you may have hit a saturation point with it where you’re still getting links, but not on new domains.

Anyway, I could go on and on about what conclusion you could come to about different situations, but that’s really not the point here. The point is that you need to track this data so that you can analyze it. The nature of that analysis will grow over time and is relative to your site, niche, keywords and experience – but if you don’t have the data, it’s all a moot point.

Wash, Rinse and Repeat

Now comes the part where you really find out if you’ve got the stones for SEO. The fact is, it can be monotonous for some, while others (no need to point fingers) like us actually enjoy this stuff! LOL… Where you end up along the scale of Do-It-Yourself at one extreme to simply hire it done at the other extreme will totally depend on you. But even if you are outsourcing your work to an SEO firm, the guidelines provided above of creating and maintaining a baseline set of metrics as well as consistent rank tracking would be a wise decision on your part.

 

Tags: developing an SEO system, getting results with seo, Rank Tracking, semrush.com, seo baseline