What does picking your nose have to do with regularly checking where you rank for your selected keywords?
Both are bad habits but for some reason a lot of people partake in both activities – and to make matters worse, they do it on a daily basis.
Why shouldn’t you check rankings?
Don’t get me wrong – it’s good to know which keywords are working for you and how your search campaign is performing… but you don’t need to check the search results daily to see where you’re ranking to do this.
Search technology and algorithms are constantly changing and improving. Different results are shown to different users based on geographic location, personalized search data and universal search. To confuse the situation even further, algorithm updates also can cause the SERPs to dance around for a few weeks until the changes propagate across all data centres.
So if the search results I see are not necessarily the same as what someone else does… how should I measure my search marketing campaign?
There are a number of statistical and analytical tools that can be used to do this:
- Most web hosting companies will provide you with access to detailed statistics recorded from your website log files.
- If your host doesn’t provide statistics, Google Analytics is free and provides some reasonably impressive reporting features.
- Want to try another analytics solution? Have a look at StoneTemple’s 2007 Analytics Shootout for other alternatives.
- Google’s Webmaster Central can also provides you with a lot of useful data on how Google interprets your site’s online presence.
When you go through your statistics, look at which keywords generate the most traffic and then go back to the SERPs to see if you can find where you rank.
Whilst you’ll probably find your site for most of the keywords, I can almost guarantee that no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find a mention of your site in the top 10 for a few keywords that you’re still receiving traffic with.
Pete, You’re spot on with this. Google Analytics tells me that one of the search terms used to arrive at my site was ‘work’. I can’t see anyway that I’d rank for that term! It must have been some bizarre combination of localised search etc…
One thing I’d like to see added to Analytics is just which search brought the traffic. It can tell me which search engine (ie Google), but I have no idea if the traffic is coming from the main search, the blog search, the image search etc.
Excellent point. I constantly have to explain to our financier that rankings are not static and that we will jump around. It still does not stop him from checking daily.
True enough I guess, however I’ve found that while rankings tend to jump around, once they keep jumping up and down from the first page they’ll end up staying on the front page eventually. Also once new sites start ranking within the top 100 they slowly/quickly proceed towards the front page. I use this data to strengthen links some of these pages and pages of a similar topic. I currently do a weekly report on our top 10 keyword rankings in all the search engines which takes about 20 minutes to complete. I also check a larger keyword list about once a month. My reason for doing so: After one year of marketing for this company they can look at a very detailed evolution from non-ranking oblivion to top ranking bliss.
For my personal campaigns I generally check only one or two keywords and my analytics program.