Newsletter Series

Part 5 - How To Track Your Search Engine Rankings

It's time to learn how to monitor your website rankings so you can keep track of how your efforts are paying off.

Traffic Travis is very good at providing you with accurate and accessible stats about your site. The trick is to monitor these statistics in order to see whether your site is improving in terms of rank or not.

Note: There is no way that using Traffic Travis can hurt the ranking of your website. If you see fluctuations in your ranking, or pages going up and down in the results, do not panic. As this is common, and a normal part of search engine marketing.

Here's what we'll cover today:

• Using the Traffic Travis Dashboard.
• What the best 'metrics' are to track your progress.
• Different ways you can monitor your site from within Traffic Travis.
• The importance of the long-term trend versus the short-term trend.

Using the Traffic Travis Dashboard

In Part 2 of the newsletter series, you learned how to import websites into the Traffic Travis Dashboard. This tab provides you with a clear overview of important website statistics, including:

• The Page Rank of your site.
• Alexa Traffic Rank (this is another way of ranking the importance of a website).
• How many pages you have indexed in the search engines you picked.
• Your highest ranked keywords are.
• How many backlinks you have, and whether that number is increasing or decreasing.
• How many unique domains are linking to your site.

What metrics should you focus on?

Metrics, in terms of SEO and website promotion, are simply different 'things you can measure' to tell how well your site is performing.

You can track a number of metrics, including:

• Number of visitors to your site.
• Conversion rates (how many people click or buy).
• Search engines rankings.
• Number of backlinks.

At this stage your main focus should be on your rankings for particular keywords. Your first priority should be getting pages ranked highly for the keywords you chose.

You can use Traffic Travis to monitor your rankings for any keywords. To do this you will have to load your site as an active project (remember that you can pick this option from the drop down box in the top right corner of the screen).

By pressing the 'SEO' button, then clicking 'Rankings', Traffic Travis will generate a list of rankings for your site for the keywords you chose when you made the project. Here is an example of this in action:

How do you add more keywords to track? Simple. Just head back to the Dashboard, and under the keywords section click the 'Add More' button. Add any keywords you would like to start tracking, and you will be able to check your ratings for them as well.

Here's a little trick you can perform with Traffic Travis to get a visual display of how you are doing for a particular keyword.

From the 'SEO'/ 'Rankings' section of Traffic Travis (this is where you got to see how your site is ranking for the keywords you selected) you can click on the 'View/Compare' option under 'Ranking History'.

Select the search engines you want to chart your rankings for over time, as well as the keywords. In this example, let's pick Google - United States as the search engine, and 'dog problems' as the keyword.

Press the OK button and you will get a graph of your ranking over time for the keywords you have picked.

This is a great way of using Traffic Travis to see how your rankings are improving over time.

The importance of the long-term trend

Patience is a virtue. And nowhere is this more true than in the world of SEO and website promotion. While tracking your results, it is important that you focus on the long-term trend, and don't get distracted by short-term fluctuations.

If you expect overnight results, you will be frustrated. Especially when trying to rank for competitive keywords. You should focus instead on how your site's rankings are improving over the long-term. Expect results over weeks and months, rather than hours or days.

Your pages might gain or lose places in the search engines on a daily basis. One day you're on Page 1 of Google, and the next day you are on Page 3 for no apparent reason. If you're emotionally invested in these short-term fluctuations it's a roller-coaster ride. That is why you should always be looking at the long-term trend rather than how you are ranking on a day to day basis.

This makes the Traffic Travis Rankings tool very useful. As we've seen above, it allows you to create accurate charts of your rankings over time, so you can see that long-term trend develop over time.

Here is an example of a chart generated by Traffic Travis that shows a long-term trend of improving ranking:

Note the dates along the bottom. This page didn't increase its ranking overnight. I took a matter of weeks to improve.

Let's take a moment to recap what we've covered so far:

• Import your website into Traffic Travis via the Dashboard to quickly check the important statistics.
• Use the Rankings tool under the SEO panel of Traffic Travis for more in-depth data.
• If you're just starting with a new site, your search engine rankings should be your primary metric.
• Focus on the long-term trend.

Problems you might run into while monitoring your rankings

Here are some solutions to common problems you might experience while tracking your rankings:

• Pages are not ranking yet. It can take time for pages to get indexed by search engines and rank for keywords. Be patient, and focus on adding your content and building more links.
• The 'Panda' Effect. Early in 2011, Google implemented a number of changes to its search algorithm, which resulted in many websites plummeting in rank. As a rule, these changes were designed to weed out low quality sites. So if you focus on providing quality content and continue to build links you should have nothing to worry about.
• Rankings not updating in 'real time'. For a number of reasons Traffic Travis does not update rankings for your websites in real time. But really, there should be no need to check your ranking constantly anyway, as we've already talked about focusing on the long term.

Wishing you every success, 'til next time,
Traffic Travis