I was speaking to a fairly experienced SEO freelancer this morning  - been in the business three years and a pretty smart guy – and was shocked to learn he wastes an entire day each month preparing ranking reports for his clients. He manually checks the results for the thousands of search terms he’s targeting, in a bunch of separate search engines. Enter term, press search, eyeball results (clicking through to pages 2-5 if necessary), rinse, repeat.

I’m sure many of you reading this are questioning my use of the words “fairly experienced” and “pretty smart” right now, but Dave reminded me a lot of SEOs are self taught and it’s easy to pick up bad habits or retain holes in your knowledge you don’t know you have. With that in mind I thought I’d paraphrase the advice I gave to my time wasting friend this morning.

The tools
There are lots of tools available for ranking reports but most are of the “SEO Swiss Army knife” variety . We steer clear of those for a variety of reasons.
As the reports I need personally tend to be for a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred search terms I find the following tools meet my needs and let me do the job without installing (or paying for) lots of extra software:

•    Mozilla Firefox
•    Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker extension for Firefox
•    Jeremy Gillick’s Switch Proxy extension for Firefox
•    Microsoft Excel or, if you don’t want to spend a single penny on this, Open Office Calc.

The process
Assuming you already have a keyword list in your spreadsheet program simply fire up Aaron’s Rank Checker (one installed it adds a button bottom right of the Firefox status bar), select the “Add multiple keywords” option and paste those babies in. Add the domain, press save, name the keyword set (I normally use the domain name in question) and you’re almost ready to go.

Before you run your report you’ll probably want to adjust the “delay between queries” in the options for this extension, as Google et al don’t like frequent, automated searches. Searching too often could mean no results or (rumour has it) “poisoned” and misleading results. I have this “courtesy setting” at 10 seconds between queries, leaving a full 40 seconds between searches (assuming you’re hitting MSN , Yahoo! and one local Google in addition to Google.com). Plenty to avoid looking like a bandwidth hog I hope (and if anyone reading this can advise of a safe rate at which to do this kind of thing I’m all ears).

That’s about it. Press “run” and leave the extension ticking away in the background while you get on with more productive tasks such as checking YouTube & Facebook.

Using proxy servers
There are two reasons you might want to use the Switch Proxy extension in conjunction with the above: to avoid being labelled a bandwidth hog (i.e. making too many queries to a given engine in a certain time period), and to get geo-targeted results.

On the first, you should be avoiding this if at all possible…ranking reports are typically a once a month job so no need to enact a mini dDOS attack on the engines. If the MD of your biggest client is on the phone demanding a report RIGHT NOW you might want to do it on the hurry up though. In that situation use Switch Proxy to send Rank Checker’s queries via an anonymous proxy, then spot check afterwards from your own IP address (or another proxy physically located close to the one you used) to make sure your rank checker results are a close or exact match for those you see with your own eyes.

The second and more common reason for rank checking via a proxy is to get geo-located results. If your client site has a geographic focus other than your own, or no specific geo-focus at all, you’ll probably want to use a proxy close to their physical location so you get as similar results to them as possible. On larger projects you might even need to run multiple reports from various locations to get a global view, though that level of detail can probably be omitted unless you’re working for one of the Amazons or Ebays of the world.

One proviso to the above: Rank Checker is a Firefox extension, not an application in its own right. Save & edit features might not be what you expect and its possible to lose saved data with an errant click. Save everything you do to a file from your spreadsheet application and you won’t go far wrong though.

That’s how I do it…would love to hear from anyone who has quicker tools, a slicker process or advice for staying on the right side of the search engines while doing this kind of thing!

This is the follow up post for who wants to come to dinner , I decided that the most worthy winner was Anthony Shapley

so at the Dinner Table we had,

Anthony Shapley - www.anthonyshapley.co.uk

Mel Carson - www.melcarson.com

Todd Crawford - www.toddtalks.com

Joost De Valk - www.yoast.com

Marcus Tandler - www.mediadonis.net

Patrick Altoft - www.blogstorm.co.uk

Al Carlton - www.selfmademinds.com

Me and Becky,

The evening was a open and frank discussion about the industry and even if we didn’t really share amazing tips, ok maybe one or two, I hoped that Anthony made some new friends around the table, I gave him my Msn messenger account so he can keep in touch, Todd so so nearly convinced me to get an iphone after showing every app in the apple store ( yes he really does have them all :) ), Marcus couldn’t eat his spicy soup or drink BEER, the beer was due to him drinking 500 litres in Munich ;)..

Anyway I hope everyone had a good time and we will do it again next time I guess :)

DaveN

Like many businesses we’re currently assessing our exposure to the effects of the financial crisis and how the trickle down impact on the “real economy” might effect us. It’s widely accepted that when times get tough the marketing budget is the first target for cost cutting, so are we, as Search Marketers, in trouble?

On the contrary, I’d say there are no better times to be in Search Engine Marketing than hard times. A lot of firms in SEO/SEM/PPC will fall by the wayside in the next 24 months, no doubt, but for those who know how to play to the strengths of our field this is a time of opportunity. In uncertain times Search Marketing has big advantages:

• Unbeatable ROI
  I spent many years involved in more traditional marketing efforts such as print advertising, direct mail, sponsorship, etc. and in my experience nothing delivers Return On Investment like Search Marketing. Every penny spent on organic search, in particular, works harder than a Japanese beaver. £50k spent on newspaper advertising might get you a single full page spread and, at best, a few hundred thousand eyeballs for a couple of seconds. £50k spent on organic search will get you tens of thousands of visitors a day for years to come.
  
  
• Quantifiable results
  A lot of traditional advertising is hit and hope, with most TV & Print campaigns having no tracking mechanism whatsoever. Direct Mail is a little better in this respect, but nothing can compare to the clear metrics you get with online marketing. Whether it’s organic search, PPC or email, online can tell you how your customers are finding you, what they’re doing when they have and, most importantly, if they’re spending their money with you.

At times like this companies have two key criteria when assigning their marketing budgets: getting as much bang for their buck as possible, and being able to see clearly how it impacts their bottom line. Search is a match made in heaven for these businesses.

As Search Marketers we need to stress these advantages and look for customers receptive to the business benefits they bring. Fortunately those companies are simple enough to find…it’s very easy to convince existing SEO clients to put more of their money in search because they’ve already seen the results it can deliver. Should you need to go looking for new business there’s plenty of low hanging fruit too: pick any industry and look at who’s spending on PPC. Check the organic rankings for same. When you find a company spending on ads that are nowhere in organic you’ve got a potential customer.

It’s tough out there but people are looking to spend wisely, not stop spending altogether. And it doesn’t get much wiser than SEM when it comes to marketing.

“Full service” agency Mindshare have launched a re-brand this week and are taking flak for an unnecessary and expensive redesign. This wouldn’t be at all unusual but in this case the criticism is coming from other West End agency chiefs rather than those of us in the trenches who boggle at spending quarter of a million on a couple of coloured circles.

We’re used to statements such as “The flow of colour symbolises the flow of creativity across the business and the segmentation mirrors the bringing together of specialist expertise within Mindshare’s ‘open source’ approach to client business which enhances a platform neutral approach” being applauded by brand pseuds, but when the people you share Cristal and a certain other C product are laying into you with comments like “I am really struggling to see the point of this” you know you’ve had your nose in the trough a bit too much.

Still, we’re used to seeing this kind of nonsense and wouldn’t pass comment if it weren’t for the fact that Mindshare recently launched an SEO division, headed up by Carolyn Watt who commented “It’s no longer about building a site or technology, it’s about positioning brands in the digital space”. Well sorry Carolyn, but there’s still some elements of building a site that are important for SEO, and not replacing your entire website with a single GIF is one of them.

Does Mindshare’s SEO division have any voice in the company, or was this done with their blessing? Either way it’s hardly what you’d call best practice (though probably no worse than their previous flash based site) and goes to show that big brand agencies aren’t always the best choice when it comes to specialist services.

In the interests of fairness and balance I did try and find out some more about their SEO services on their other website, www.mindshareworld.com, but gave up the fourth time I got an internal server error.

What are the Top Seo Blogs in the UK.,, According to Google Trends thats is..

I have been playing a little today, at the Moment It’s Davidnaylor.co.uk and Blogstorm.co.uk are the front runners.. andybeard.eu is third at the moment

I have tried redflymarketing.com, cornwallseo.com, timnash.co.uk, distilled.co.uk

so any ideas make a list of who I should check

DaveN