Monitoring Your Search Engine Rankings

March 31, 2010

Advanced Web Ranking

How do you know if your web site is doing well for a large number of keywords, both top tier and long tail?

How do you quantify the results of the huge amount of effort you’ve put forth?

You gone to a lot of hard work to include quality content, optimize the site for both visitors and search engines, develop a quantity of good quality links to it, and have made every effort to make it a respected site in the eyes of the search engines, especially Google.

Has all your work paid off?

Advanced Web Ranking is a software application by Caphyon that I have used for 5 years to help measure how my clients’ (and my own) websites are doing in the SERPs. I will tell you right now this is a sponsored article, however I NEVER recommend anything that I don’t believe in.

Visual Results

My clients absolutely love the ranking reports I send them from the results I get from Advanced Web Ranking. It gives them a visual of how well our SEO efforts are doing via the current website ranking for each keyword, and it’s exciting to see how a specific keyword advances from month to month.

As a keyword rises in search engine ranking results, reports give it an awesome green + along with the number of places it has gone up, and that gets my clients (and me) really excited and happy. Conversely, if a keyword is dropping in rankings, it’s indicated with a red – sign, and although that can be a bummer, it’s also a call to action to work on that particular keyword phrase.

Below is a screenshot of one of the pages of an actual ranking report I ran for a client.

If you’re running reports for clients, you can personalize your reports by adding both your and their logos. Reports can be exported in HTML, PDF, Excel (XLS), XML, TXT, and CSV formats, and printed or emailed directly to clients.

Search Engine Friendly

I typically choose the Google search engine, of course, and a couple of others. I like it that if my client is located in another country I can check the rankings that show up within that country’s search results. There are over 1,000 search engines available to pull from, located all over the world, so it doesn’t matter if you’re in the USA or Guatemala or the South Pole. These are constantly updated by Caphyon to ensure that results are always correct (it seems like almost every time I use it there’s an update).

Because AWR uses human emulation technology, when a report is run the search engine requests are indistinguishable from a web browser. (Sometimes Google will demand that I complete a Captcha on my personal searches for the remainder of the day following a run, but it’s a small price to pay.) You can use multiple proxy servers to decrease the update time, which can take quite awhile if the list of keywords is extremely long.

In addition, you can check the position of your keywords in Google through the Google AJAX API, and by using more than one Yahoo API key.

Keywords

Speaking of keywords, you can easily import a list of as many keywords as you want, from a website, a .txt file, Google Suggest or Wordtracker. I get quite a bit of use out of the Keyword Research Tool that’s built right in. The keyword builder feature will help you create compound keywords, starting from the individual words you provide, which will save you a lot of time when you’re setting up a site’s keywords within their profile.

Check Out Your Competitors

Add your competitors’ URLs to the run and you can directly compare your rankings with theirs. Target the keywords you want, get to work, and over time you’ll (hopefully) be able to watch their rankings drop while yours increase. You can also get a visibility overview of your site compared to theirs.

I Could Go On and On…

But I won’t – there are so many features available with this software, and you can learn more about them from the product’s website, where they describe them better than I can.

But I’ll tell you this – once you’ve tried the 30 DAY FREE TRIAL you’ll be so impressed you’re gonna want it! Yep, a 30 day fully functional free trial – so here’s my suggestion: download the software, set up your profile, add your keywords and run the program. Work on your site optimization and build some inbound links. 29 days later, run it again (set it up to run automatically so you don’t forget) and see if you’ve made progress. It gets addictive when you start seeing a site get increasingly better search engine rankings, and with the program starting at $99, not too expensive even if you use it only for one site.

Advanced Link Manager Bonus

When you download the free trial, you’ll also get a 30 day trial of Advanced Link Manager. I haven’t used this software yet, but with it you can the check the link popularity for your website:

find out who links to your site and what keyword they use
track the status of your links over time
discover where your competition is getting their links

A feature in the Enterprise version that has me interested is the Webpage Analyzer, which not only helps you find new ways to improve page optimization but also helps analyze competitor and potential link partner pages.

For each analyzed URL you can quickly gather information including:

domain age and page rank
meta information (title description, robots, keywords, author)
the number of outbound and onsite links

Keep Track of Paid Links

Got paid links, you bad boy or girl? If so, you can monitor them using this software, and get warning emails if a link is taken down. That alone could save you a bundle of money over time.

Link Building Made Easier

The ability to run a variety of link management reports for yourself and/or clients is impressive and offers a way to get a handle on this part of SEO. Since link building is the most time consuming, tedious part of SEO, anything that will help manage links and find more quality links this quickly and easily is a boon.

If you download the free trial and try out the program(s) I’d love to hear your opinion. Just leave a comment below.