Checking Your Search Engine Ranking

March 9, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 59 views // View Comments
Checking Your Search Engine Ranking
Checking your search engine rankings can be critical in understanding the success (or failure) of your SEO campaign.

In one of my previous articles, we talked about the Importance of Running Baseline Reports. Now it’s time to start to apply this process on your own site. The first thing we need to do is check out your rankings in the search engines.

A quick word of warning - Try not to obsess over your ranks! Rankings are important, but I don’t want you to give yourself a heart attack worrying that your website dropped 2 spots in the rankings from yesterday.

Instead, we will try to use our ranks to understand how search engines percieve our site, as well as to look for other fundamental areas that may be affecting our site’s ranking.

Manual Rank Checking

I recommend using Microsoft Excel to do any manual rank checking. Use the first column in each row to add your keywords, and then create headers at the tops of columns 2,3, 4 and label them Google, Yahoo, and MSN respectively.

Now move through your list of keywords and perform a search for each keyword on Google. Tip: Only scan the Top 30 results as it may save you some time. Record the result in the appropriate column. If there is no result simply put “none.”

Repeat this process for all keywords across all search engines.

Automated Rank Checking

There is no getting around it. Checking your rankings can be a bit boring and can take a long time. To make the process of checking search engine ranks go faster, some SEOs use automated ranked checking software.

This software acts as a spider and queries the search engines in a human-like random fashion to check your rankings. I like to use WebCEO for my ranking reports, but many people use Web Position and other software as well.

Manual vs. Automated Rank Checking

  • Manual rank checking is often more accurate than automated checking. Automated rank checkers may mistake directory sites, partner sites, or sponsored listings as your site, or may place them in the ranks above your site when they aren’t.

For example, if your are using WebCEO and the “Knowledge Base” is out of date, it may cause some bugs and improper reporting.

  • Automated Rank Checking is much faster! Using software to check your rankings can take much less time, and allows you to do other things while the report is running.

For example, if you searched for 30 keywords across 3 search engines, that means you will have to perform 90 searches! That takes quite some time…

  • Manual rank checking allows you to go in-depth. If you look for keywords manually, you enjoy to opportunity to research and learn from your competitors, see which pages of your site are ranking, as well as find any potential flaws on your own site such as 404 errors and the like.
  • Search engines frown on Automated Rank Checkers. Automated software performs multiple queries which is often cumbersome for the search engines to process. In fact, many of these automated tools actually violates Google’s Terms of Agreement.

Which Do I Recommend?

If you have a short keyword list that you would like to manage closely, then I would recommend checking your rankings manually.

If you have a larger list of keywords and aren’t worried about any possible irregularities caused by such software, then I’d say go ahead and use the automated rank checkers…

It is completely up to you which method to use. Both methods yield almost the same result, with the exception of time spent.

Photo Credit: tathei on Flickr

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