Are you wasting time on SEO reporting?
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!
21 Comments
Vipey - http://www.vipey.com
Aaron wall;s tool is really good, theres alot of similar stuff but i find it gives pretty accurate results.
im constantly getting blocked by google which drives me mad entering CAPTCHA
just a heads up to say the proxy plugin link is broken
Malaiac - http://www.malaiac.com
the links forAaron Wall’s Rank Checker extension and Jeremy Gillick’s Switch Proxy extension are broken (http: / / h tt p : // )
nice extensions anyway
Daniel Mcskelly - http://www.bronco.co.uk
Thanks for the heads up on the links guys. Think Dave got in there and fixed them before I saw your comments.
Jeff
Aaron’s Rank Checker works well. Make sure to do spot checks of the data though…
Ken Jones - http://www.seopscentre.com
Great write up Daniel. I’ve been using Rank Checker for a while now with a similar wait time between queries and never seem to have a problem with getting blocked (although forgetting to switch off Aaron’s other tool, SEO for Firefox, has seen me get a couple of time outs when running extended queries on Site Explorer 🙂
Hadn’t really thought too much about the value of using a proxy before as most of the sites I’ve been dealing with are UK focussed anyway, but I’ll certainly give it a try.
Thanks for the tips.
Daniel Ford - http://www.guava.se/
It also depends on the number of clients you have, and how many reports you need to run. We have a quite cheap software called Advanced Web Ranking to check the rankings for our clients. The software can be set to automatically e-mail out the reports after completion to your and/or the client.
Dan Horton SEO
Nice Post Dan
Nick
Pretty outrageous how long I used to spend reporting 40+ clients on a monthly basis. Rankings, work completed, future work to be completed. To be honest though, after speaking to most of the clients, all they ever really wanted was their ranking reports – the rest of the material was required by the agency I was at. Even having a dedicated person reporting on analytics gets too much once you reach 100 clients. Thankfully Google analytics came along and solved most of our worries.
Vinay - http://www.juretic.com
I used SheerSEO tool few times and it looks great, not really something I would advice to depend but its a great tool to keep track of your rankings. Sends automated report every week and you have a very good view to see when your ranking went down and at what point.
Reports ranking from both Google & Yahoo.. they have started to provide ranking for other geographic-specific for a fee.. not sure how helpful this is but nevertheless…good to try! – http://sheerseo.com
Another easier way (something I use) would be to use SEO for Firefox Plugin from SEOBook, and setting your result (from Google, Yahoo, MSN) to 100 (or) 50.
Enter the query in search engine, on the result page use CTRL+F and search for the URL, when you have noticed it see the SERP position number which is displayed on left end (when you have the SEO for Firefox activated).
Displays something like “#3” easy to track, fast and efficient indeed. I’ve been using this for few months and found easier to prepare ranking reports.
Hope this helps! Cheers
Andy Dawson - http://www.bluesnapper.com
I use Internet Business Promoter (IBP) for ranking checks.
I like this app because you can point it at a huge variety of global and regional SEs and directories (if so inclined, which I’m not) and it has a ‘human emulation’ feaure which can be customised. I set this wide which takes longer to run reports but less stress on SEs and less chance of getting booted off!
Andy
Is Your Keyword Research Methodology Up To Scratch? - pingback
[…] them how will you measure your performance? (Admittedly ranking reports are rapidly becoming less and less relevant though they still have a place in most clients KPIs) How will you know you’re looking at the right […]
Is Your Keyword Research Methodology Up To Scratch? | Web Data Source - pingback
[…] them how will you measure your performance? (Admittedly ranking reports are rapidly becoming less and less relevant though they still have a place in most clients KPIs) How will you know you’re looking at the right […]
Yolki
I guess I’m surprised that you guys still do ranking reports. I haven’t done them for 3-4 years. But then, funnily enough, 3-4 years ago was the last time I had clients. I just look at volume increases, sales increases and do a few arbitrary checks on key areas.
Has anyone ever tried to tell clients that it’s pretty much a waste of time? Or is this still how they like it?
Daniel Mcskelly - http://www.bronco.co.uk
Yolki, we spend a fair amount of time explaining to new clients that an increase in conversions is far more important than moving up the rankings for pet search terms.
But at the end of the day some people, particularly at boardroom level, still see a #1 for term X as a big indicator of success. Bottom line counts most, we do impress that on people, but they like to be #2 for “cars” or whatever too 🙂
Allan Stewart
As an inhouse online marketing manager I would echo Danieals comments to you on this Yolki. “Unfortunatly” most CEO’s / Investors, like to think they are smart and throw you a curv ball at a presentation by tapping away on their laptop, then pipping up “We are no where to be found for the term Cherry Chapstick” what ever it might be. To this end I find ranking reports such as those mentioned in this article to be a very useful retort, i.e. fair enough but “Look what we do rank for” Slap! This plus an overview of “number of search phrases” growth over time in a nice uppy pionting graph tends to help.
This said, CEO and Board directors are not stupid by any means and learn very fast (usually). And more and more now, companies, CEO’s and opps directors etc are becoming increasingly savvy about the important of conversions over individual kp phrases.
I think the important thing is to maintain a balanced approach and the best way to keep all people happy is to try and anticipate their behaviour / possible curve balls in a meeting scenario. Tools such as ranking trackers can be very helpful, a large dowse of pracmatism, good ROI and profit figures also help and if you are good at what you do, generally tend to follow.
Any way, bla bla bla, sure you all know this sort of stuff. Just thought I would add my two pence worth, I am an SEO afterall and thats what us SEO’s do.
We’ll be known as an industry of car sales men soon if we are not careful!! 😉
Allan Stewart
P.s. Great post BTW Dan. Very timelly and useful for me, as I was just speaking to web trends about some ‘expensive’ keyphrase tracking tools 😉
SPOT ON…
Doug Heil
Hi Dave, I think Daniel above hit right on it:
“Has anyone ever tried to tell clients that it’s pretty much a waste of time?”
I have done just that starting about 5 years ago, and explained just how useless rank checking it. It’s worked a charm. 🙂 The beauty of it is that you no longer have to go against the big G’s guidelines on automated programs and can focus instead on the things that really mean something.
Of course; this is my opinion, and we all know how much that’s worth. 🙂
SeoDEEP - http://www.terabitservers.com
I believe both G ranking (first page) and conversion are important.
For rank checking I use “Free Monitor for Google”.
Use proxy if use it for many sites, or G will block your IP.
Stephen Quallich - http://slxls.com/blog
All I can say is wow, Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker does indeed make it a lot easy. I used google’s webmaster tools to see how my sites were performing for their keywords, but the data it shows is a bit outdated and not instantly updatable. Really thank you for informing me about this tool.
SEO Drama Queen - http://www.amfireinteractive.com
I’ve been using Aaron’s firefox extension, RankChecker, and Im not recieving accurate results at all. I think it works for Google.com but its crappy for Google.co.uk Maybe I am doing something wrong, I dunno…
Martina Skelly - http://www.activate.ie
Has anyone any experience of using Agent Web Rank for checking SERPS?