benchmarking site rank for seo

evaluating a website's current "rank"

[sean_ellis]

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to webmasterworld, so sorry if this is a topic that's been beaten to death etc.

Before we start optimizing our sites for search engine visibility we thought it would be good to get an idea of our current placement to compare with later.

I've checked with google, msn, and lycos, to get numbers for inbound links, and I can record our 'page rank' as it appears in the google toolbar.

Can anyone offer suggestions to complement these steps?

thanks,

Sean

[werty]

I would make a list of your current "money terms", the words you are trying to get your site ranked high for. Then I would search for these terms on the different search engines and record your position.

Then in a month or so, I would run the same seaches and see if your ranking improved.

If you have access to log files, you may want to check your logs, or your site statistics, and set that as a starting point too; "We had XXX ammount of visitors before we started, we are at XXXX in month one, XXXXX month 2..."

[deejay]

Presumably you have a list of keywords/phrases you are aiming for and your current rank in the relevant engines on each of those phrases? (I record both quoted and unquoted for phrases).

And you've nailed down statistics from your logs of visits, from what SEs, etc. I also do an evaluation of relevance of search terms - to make sure you're achieving targetted traffic growth.

[sean_ellis]

Logfiles, eh (doh!). Okay. I can do that. We're using awstats right now, but we do have the raw files, so they can be crunched any which way.

And the rank with our chosen search terms. Basic stuff.
Ok.

[deejay]

Basic stuff.

:) Exactly. Otherwise you can end up spending your life analysing and never getting to the doing.

Awstats is actually my mainstay - gives me most of what I want to see pretty much in a nutshell.

The one thing that I really miss is tying individual searchs/ terms back to individual pages - if I could get that without having to hit the raw logs I'd be a pretty happy clam.

[ogletree]

you get that from your logs. Whatever you are getting now is what is ranking. Look at the six months down the road and you will see a difference. It is as easy as that.

[chrisnrae]

In addition, keep a list of potential additions to the site in order to capture search engine visibilities in areas that you currently aren't. They don't have to be done immediately, but keep track of any possible ideas (new site pages, new specifics of current topics to cover, the like) so that once your traffic on the current pages is where you want it to be, you can start to expand it. By then, you should have a great list of new terms to target and additions to make to do so. ;)

[jimbeetle]

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Where are everybody's manners?

Welcome to WW, Sean.

I'd like to chime in to say that since your site is already active I'd recommend that you do an initial crunch of the logs to find which search terms and what SEs by which your visitors are currently getting to the site.

Your logs are gold; mining them can turn up a lot of information. You might think that folks should search for "large and wide green-striped widgets" but find that folks get to the site by a very wide variety of search terms.

Use it. This is the only marketing information that is yours and basically cost and development free.

[sean_ellis]

ok, that's great. Somewhere to start and get my teeth sunken into. Thanks for the welcome, and for the replies,

--
Sean

[SEOSoftware]

Try a look at click tracks. Shows each page and what engines did what etc. Also does PPC tracking.

NOTE: I have no relationship with them therefore this isn't promotion.

Mike

[edited by: msgraph at 12:50 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2004]
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