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?

If you have clients then I think it and total search volume are important in that it gives them an easy metric to look at which can be directly tied to your performance, unlike measurements like sales numbers or page impressions.  Though I would it is much less important than the actual user, impressions, signup and sales numbers in determining the vitality of a project.

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.

Clearly rank checking isn't as important as sales or visitor numbers, but I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to keep on top of it. If I suddenly go out of the index for a keyword that I really want to rank for, I want to know when it happened and then try and work out why. Alternatively, which happened to me the other day, if I suddenly appear in the index from being sandboxed I want to know when it happened and again I really need to try and to find out why. That way I can at least attempt to work out what actions (new content, new links, removal of links etc) are having an effect on the site(s) ranking.

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

Thanks for posting your tool of preference Ed, what else are you guys using for rank checking?

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.

""Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments, and the tendency of people to disparage statistics that do not support their positions. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.

"The term was popularised in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Other coiners have therefore been proposed. The most plausible, given current evidence, is Englishman Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911).[citation needed]"

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.

Any tools out there that can check 1000's of rankings? would help to streamline link building

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.

Funny, I packed in Rank checking when I gave up the Pagerank obsession.

It was at the time I realised that Traffic came from lots of different terms and places, and that it was an unhealthy obsession that took me away from building my business in other areas.

At the moment I am trying to tie down what I call a Customer referer, and an order referrer.  The first is the way the customer originally found me, and the second it what they clicked on to buy on.  Clicks in between are also of interest, and the data is going into the pond, even though I am not sure how to use it.

I am hoping that I will learn what actually makes me money, not what Google tells me.  Because their Stats lie as Mr Twain says.   Maybe then I will be interested in Ranking, but for me, so long as the traffic is there, and some of them convert, thats fine.

I have one keyphrase, that is a "vanity" phrase, and brings in little business.

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)

Quoteimprobable perspective..

ha ha, I like your wording!

ASPD, yes I realise that Clients are different, I have only 3 left and they leave me alone, as the know my feelings on business.

( If they want to build it, they should do it themselves, I can help getting traffic, and can get better ranks for specific key phrases, but it is their business, so the impetus has to come from within. Harsh, but fair for what I charge imho)

Does noone use topdogg or any of the old PC based ones now?  Too easy to block?

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 fucking 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

Ah, yes.. conversion rates... :)  for each source.

and lifetime value of the customer....  how to get them back to spend again. It used to be so easy when I did not have to worry about that, but I have to say, I was starting to get bored.

One day Dogboy, you will have to explain that to me over a beer.   I am missing a key piece to understand what you were doing there.

>> if all you do is watch your ranks

yeah, but you'd be a lunatic if ALL you did was watch your ranks.  That doesn't meant there isn't value in watching your rankings though, even if you're only answerable to yourself.

Quote from: dogboy on March 07, 2011, 01:07:20 PM
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.

Totally agree, I generally watch the revenue, and if that changes (pos or neg), then I look into the ranks/logs. This is after the site is humming of course, and I'd probably be better off to do both.

Market Samurai is supposed to be pretty good at tracking ranks over time, but I've not really used it so I don't know what scale it can handle.

OK, so a summary...

- Can't compare to leads & sales. Bottom line matters most, rank checking can be an indicator as to why income is changing.

- Ranks not indicative of conversions

- Rank checking coverage an issue for sites attracting longer tail terms going into 10s of thousands of keyword variations (unless able to stretch resources to track these too)

- Personalisation of results decrease meaning of rank results (check from more than one place? Have bots with cookie profiles?)

- Against ToS of engines

- Only useful for search engine traffic

========

- Clients like them as a 'progress metric', sparkly charts make you look busy and gives them something pretty to look at, if that's what keeps them happy

- Useful for big ticket keywords more so than long-tail

- Can check for a site or page being penalised e.g. I ranked #1 for X with my home page but now its replaced with /innerpage.htm at rank #54.

- Discover movers and shakers. See who's new on the block. Gives an opportunity to investigate backlink profiles and tactics.

- Some kind of grouping of niche/importance required for keywords for better understanding/ordering of results (See Adam C's post). Alongside categories I think using PPC * traffic is a good rough guide to keyword importance (with PPC indicative of keyword converting?)

=========

I think having rank check data and a backlink tool can have advantages, but the priority of looking and learning from this info is a little into the deck if your main concern is increasing income straight away.

That sistrix data pointed out that overstock had a wide range of ranks for terms demoted. Not only is it worth knowing if you're competing, but it's good to know who took their place and who went down with them.

Danny Sullivan tweeted a few things from SMX that I thought were relevant to this:

@dannysullivan

• 20% of Google queries not seen before in past 3 months
• 64% of Google searches have pages without exact matches to all query terms
• 44% searches on google have more than 3 words

So, chances are anything you are tracking SERP wise is only ever going to be a small part of the picture.  However I'd still rather have that part of the picture than none.  The trend it provides is useful even if the specifics are limited.

Funny, but this thread bothers me a little. There are several people talking about several different scenarios and I'm not sure we are all really clearly outlining the issues, so we are all kinda talking about the same things, but we aren't precise enough in our language to really clarify our positions or shed any new light.

I can say that there are several intense learning experiences that deal with issues, like this one, that I spent a ridiculous time looking at theoretically as well as in practice.  And this one repeatedly shocked me until I got a handle on how things really work in practice.

Here is an example. You have an overall 1:8 lead:click ratio. your kw strategy revolves around a 3 word phrase that you can break down nicely into two words, and with a little effort, one word, although it's a little generic. But the one word kw brings tons of traffic, the 2 word brings alot, and then the three word phrase tapers way off. And if you have no way of connecting the end points you assume that the number of sales is somehow proportional to the amount of traffic...

You shouldn't do that. Don't assume anything here. Because you may be right. Or you may not. Which means you don't know so it's stupid to guess.

...now is where if i wasnt on my phone, and I had a bunch of time, I would come up with a bunch of examples of 3 keyword strings where I show you that you are totally right, and others where you would be totally wrong.

And then throw something out there like:

'car', 'used car', 'used red car' and ask you how you sold your car and you think you can come back to me and tell me you have a 60% chance of it being car and a 90% chance of it being either 'car' or 'used car' and then I say "wrong! It was 'Toyota Prius clearfield NY' and they found you using google shopping!  It only got one hit'

...and then you would say, 'how the he'll would I know that?'. And I would say what ever made you think you could predict anything with 90% certainty? And basically, eventhough I'm making a totally bullshit argument, you can't tell me I'm wrong. Because you don't know. And that's the problem. People are always sure they know something when in fact they don't.

but the thing is dogboy, you seem to be assuming that

1) we don't know what keyword actually resulted in the conversion
and
2) that the keyword that resulted in the conversion is the one keyword which matters

and thats not an assumption which should be made :)

>you seem to be assuming that we don't know what keyword actually resulted in the conversion
First you will need to define 'we', as there are a few conversations here as I noted, but if you think I'm speaking to anyone in this thread in particular, I'm not....

But in many cases (and especially if you are sending money into an affiliate link) you have no idea which term actually generated the sale. This leads to watching your ranks with more intensity, but with no more data, which leads to speculation and assumptions. 

If you happen to be one of the people that control everything 'from SERP to checkbook' then you are lucky, but even lucky, many people have 3 stats programs, and log files, and can tell you where they are getting clicks, and they can show you a bank account... but the systems aren't really connected.  There's the traffic and there's the sales, but no one really knows how they are connected, just that they must be. Correlation? Causality? Both? I maintain the answer isn't one way or the other all the time. It depends on your unique situation.

>that the keyword that resulted in the conversion is the one keyword which matters
'what matters'... that's tricky. If I'm sending money through an affiliate program, I care but I'll never know.  If I am receiving traffic from an affiliate, I don't know AND I don't really care but it might be nice for my own advertising efforts.  There are also lots of companies out there that DO care and don't know. And vice-versa.  If you are an SEO that is trying to justify your job by showing ranks to your boss then it is important, especially if you aren't converting.  (it's either traffic quality or your site sucks, but at least you are 'ranking', which means at least there is opportunity for a sale.) If you are an SEO that gets paid on flat clicks, then you don't care about sales, but the company buying them, does.

...see what I mean?  'What matters' depends on your perspective.  But as far as which is more important, 'Ranking' or 'Sales' ....unless you sell rankings... 'sales' are ultimately the only thing that matters to a business.... assuming the business is in business to make money. 

In one industry i work in, i look at rankings fairly often - is only part of jigsaw but is a nice guide for targeting our link building. We go after the major terms, because we can, they convert, and the long tail follows. The rankings are also used in industry reports to report on our performance which effects deals we do. So for this industry rankings are fairly important. We convert pretty well, helps the other results are mostly us too. Fortunately we can track that keyword to an exact cash value :)

For another sector, i don't think i've ever looked at rankings, or the traffic we get. We just do what we know works.

For another the top broad terms have so much volume our link building is just brute force and 100% focused on these terms. Ranking for big brands is the dogs :) So we check these rankings now and then to see how we're doing.

Tool, i would love is something that could pull in my rankings for 10,000's of terms i target - so i could better assign my link building.

For us rank checking really depends on type of site, spend, profit etc

Quote from: PaulH on March 10, 2011, 04:46:27 PM
Tool, i would love is something that could pull in my rankings for 10,000's of terms i target - so i could better assign my link building.

Do you use AWR?  At what point does this break for you?

Quote from: Rooftop on March 10, 2011, 10:06:32 AM

• 20% of Google queries not seen before in past 3 months
• 64% of Google searches have pages without exact matches to all query terms
• 44% searches on google have more than 3 words

Great stats, but one of them really, really annoys me as a surfer.
64% of Google searches have pages without exact matches to all query terms

This really pisses me off when I'm searching. I type the terms in for a reason, and often have to quote them to get what I want. This is a huge fail IMO.

even worse now: Google sometimes insists it is right even when you put quotes around it, + it etc. 

I check some of my sites and some of my competitors using an automated tool. I have a big site with 0000's of products so it's useful to see where the ranking/traffic gaps are.

Quote from: Rooftop on March 10, 2011, 10:06:32 AM

• 20% of Google queries not seen before in past 3 months
• 64% of Google searches have pages without exact matches to all query terms
• 44% searches on google have more than 3 words

Yep those are interesting, a bit surprising at first and lack a little details?

>20% of Google queries not seen before in past 3 months

I'm guessing a lot of these are celebrities, entertainment, other names and brands. news too.

>64% of Google searches have pages without exact matches to all query terms

yep it's bugging how google assumes the words you mean. I'm not sure if this figure includes typos but it's a high number.

>44% searches on google have more than 3 words

the biggest problem with comprehensive rank checking. as said i think it depends on the niche. a q&a site will have 10's of thousands of kw variations. a mortgage site will have more predictable queries + locality searches.

Quote from: Rooftop on March 14, 2011, 04:04:26 PM
even worse now: Google sometimes insists it is right even when you put quotes around it, + it etc. 

they just managed to confuse me very badly. I searched for a 2 word niche term including the word syndicate.  >50,000 results. I didn't click on anything on page 1, on page 2 every result was about the local nightclub called syndicate.  I had to click back and then forward again to get the results I actually wanted to see.

Somehow think they might be testing some click tracking variances :)

That or the Google spies saw you tumble out of it on friday and put 2+2 together.

'Rank checking' has far less value to me now than it ever has, and will have even less in the future I think.

'Personalized search', 'regional results', 'flat line' capping of traffic etc.... have all played their part in making it increasingly difficult to trust that the client, his potential visitors, and 'we' are all seeing the same results. It has also given us some welcome leverage in convincing our clients of the need to switch to other metrics to measure performance.

We check sales and site visitors, and react if we see something unexpected happen there - rank checking is what we do as one of the steps of 'reacting'.

I fully understand why some people need to use to keep clients happy, and understand it does still have some uses, but I prefer to try and train clients to focus on the metrics that really matter. I would rather have an easy life and less money than be 'rolling in it' and have to listen to another t**t of a client ring us up at 8.58am complaining that he is no longer #3 for a phrase that his MD thinks is important but has actually made f**k all sales in the last 2 years.

If I was motivated to get, and keep, the larger more lucrative clients, I would obviously need to change my tune... but s*d them, they just get in the way of having fun :)

For those who do like to track their SERPs :

I like one of the options that you have in Raven tools SERP checker.  You can display the SERP changes alongside traffic data from analytics.  I find this particularly useful in keeping people on message with the keywords that actually bring traffic, rather than the phrases that the client insisted you track despite them beind worthless.

Sadly can't bring in goal or e-commerce data yet. However it does at least provide some context to SERPs.

All in all I am turning in to a bit of a fan of Raven.  It is an awful long way from being perfect and there are some obvious omissions.  However it is still the best blend of usefulness and price that I have tried to date.  Worth a try if you are looking for seo tools. 

I still rank check for clients, some request it and others have as part of their monthly report - I tend to use Rankchecker from seobook.com

I'm with 4Eyes on this one - I've found providing a report with a singular review of ranking has meant spending time fielding questions like: 'then why can't I see that on my computer?'.

Rankings checking is useful as an alert or after the fact as part of an analysis of success/failures but I'd always want to couple it with traffic analysis and tie to conversions...if I can join up the data!

http://www.seobook.com/why-rank-checking-still-useful

thought this was a well put article