The Core

The Sistrix data was banded around a fair bit after the recent google updates, giving some weight to tracking ranking positions on the big engines.

So is anyone rank checking, using rank checking services or think it's a total waste of time?

Yes vote from me, but more because it takes so little time and effort rather than because it brings huge
gain. It's all automated, can provide some useful direction and, if it's client work gives them some thing perry to look at. All good to me as long as no one loses site of the important stuff.

I should add that I use Link-Assistant's Rank Tracker as part of their overall SEO Power Suite. You can get a pretty good free version though at:

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Cheers,

Ed

There is an obvious correlation between your rank and your conversions... IF all your traffic is generated by engines. Which is a big assumption.

And another big a## assumption is the term you are watching is the term that actually converts. In other words, unless you continuously look at several measurements, and really understand what you are being told... and maybe what you are NOT being told... it's easy to get the wrong impression.

agency clients expect ranks to be checked.  No discussion.

Of course the issues are numerous (have a client at the moment who ranks somewhere around 40 for money terms but insists they rank at 4 because that's what they see when they search. Personalisation sucks) but frankly I can't imagine not having a handle on where a site ranks, and, almost as importantly, where competitors rank. Otherwise you have nothing to hang the data that really matters on. If traffic doubles for a specific term that is likely due to improved rankings but could be due to something else (seasonal, offline marketing, someone remembering to upload product feed finally, PPC tracking gone wrong and sending as straight google referrer, whatever).

I'm using a tool I helped develop because we hated all the ones we tested. I can't link to it because he doesn't seem to have a sales page up yet. Works pretty well incuding a client front end with pretty graphs and deals with worldwide rankings though, so if anyone wants the guys email address ping me and you can ask him for a demo.

I'm kind of surprised rank checking has always been slammed so hard in the SEO media.  Rank checking over time provides an invaluable indication of your site's performance. 

Personally, I've always found value (when working in long tail rich markets especially) in building rank reports based on keyword groups and tracking a high level metric over time (e.g. average ranking, or visibility percentage).

Of course this doesn't tell you how much money you're making or what your traffic is going.  But when things change, it becomes much easier to identify what has changed and why if you have ranking trend data at your disposal.

Weirdly, it's what I was thinking these days - with SMM exploding last year or two, I think people don't depend so heavily on the first three places of google. And as in your example, Rupert, if you can convince a client not to obsess on the pr, you might - might - make a point there too. But it's an improbable perspective... You know, kinda what you think when the flight attendant who tells you that you're a dozen times safer in air - "yeah, right!.."

I use the Rank Tracker from the SPS package since the reports looks quite fancy if you need to present them on clients (plus, if you do care actually on ranking, it gives you good set of features to check it)

Here is the issue as I see it...

If all you do is watch your ranks, and you have no way to determine which clicks actually make you money (you do not track the click from the listing to your bank account) despite what you think, you are most likely wrong, unless you only really rank for a few big terms and nothing else.

It's all about correlation vs causality. And eventhough I learned this years ago, i have to remind myself everytime I look at imperfect data. Back in the day, I had a half dozen sites I was using to move adult engine traffic. I was paid per click based on conversion rates. I then figured out how to move the traffic (by feel/not math) to move it around so it made even more money. It's true I lost a bunch of traffic but I was also able to divide my traffic into groups based on conversions.

For example, if I was moving generic traffic at 1:400, but I needed to get that number below 1:350 before I bumped up to the higher ppc price, I would move over some traffic that I had already strained down to a 1:50conversion rate and then I would shut down the mainstream traffic source and when I reached 1;349, I shut off all traffic.  Then I would look around and review all my accounts and figure out how to maximize what I had left, by adding very high or very low traffic into the mix then shutting it off when I just hit my number.

I did all that without tracking since I couldn't actually track the click once it got to their site. And let me tell you, I learned a lot and went a little batty trying to manage it. In the end I made the most out of the traffic but have to admit maybe I should have just spent my time getting more traffic and less time f###ing with it, but it did teach me that you can't just look at ranks and volume. Its all about identifying money terms and then spending your energy getting more of the cream off the top