What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings, eg if I wanted to target a new phrase and wanted to check the progress of its ranking – what is the best way to check it? Should I just search Google and scroll through the results? Tommo, London, UK
What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings?
25 Responses to What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings?
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Matt, your reaction in “Okey Tommo…” LOL!!! Priceless!! (MasterCard’s like)
god help us all. the “first” crowd of assclowns has discovered googlewebmasterhelp channel.
@iceveiled we knew that eventually aesholes from blogspot will be spamming videos as well.
Good answer as always, everyone is always going after the trophy phrases. I’ve found some really unexpected keywords coming up in my google analytics. Most of the SEO ‘Gurus’ on uk business forums think that you cant learn SEO from just watching your videos. I beg to differ.
Surprised Matt did not mention the new “search queries” feature of Google Webmaster Tools, which is probably the best way to check your site’s rankings, if you insist on doing so.
@PatrickSMCable I agree – though it really does the same thing as gg analytics. I’ve been comparing the data from both programs and finding some disparity – perhaps he knows & is keeping quiet about GWTs new function being a bit buggy at the mo ( that’s just a guess, obviously!)
@xpose2000 I disagree with that! It all depends on the term, of course, but putting effort into the big phrases brings about long-tail success all by itself.
This is interesting since lynda.com’s SEO tutorials suggest working towards “keyword gems”, contradicting with what you said.
Yes That a nice suggestion matt;
but you are saying do not use only a term but use a phrase to search it…
But when people looking for a particular business or keyword then how can they target on phrase instead of keyword; I know they can include their keyword in the phrase but when they are checking the rank they just go for keyword..
Little bit confusing..
Regards
Imran Khan
that was an answer from the land of rainbows and unicorns
The best way to check your ranks is to use Firefox addon.
Matt, Matt, Matt…what’s up with the calm tone of voice? I wanna see you get mad. Furrowed brow and all that. Just once. Haha! Kidding.
Thanks for the info., and Tommo, thanks for asking.
very good advise!
You’re right you can optimize a site much more for your time if you skip “checking keyword rankings”.
What about using the keywords page in google webmaster tools?
look at the holistic picture
As always Matt, thanks for the info
This is old Chris Anderson style philo. Very solid advice but a bit tired and played to the more advanced user. More and more people are optimizing for the various channels and creating communities/campaigns around derivatives of a certain keyword. Look at Google’s…
* Everything
* Images
* Videos
* Maps
* News
* Shopping
* Books
* Blogs
* Updates
* Discussions
@Alexeixx3 Yeah… wouldnt this work too for checking out what longtails you are ranking for?? As apposed to checking your server logs??
This was a non-answer. Nobody ever said anything about only focusing on one or two “trophy” phrases. The guy asked one questions and Matt answered something completely different. Once we have our “holistic” view of the keywords our site is doing well for, and we want to improve those, you better believe we’re going to be watching the rankings. The question is, what’s the best way to do that?
Matt,
Will the Ajax API be able exported to some type of report, etc? Via Google analytics? Google Webmaster Tools? For Historical Data to show SEO Clients? Great advice on video .. we know what phrases convert, etc.. but need to show client progress on those terms as justification for SEO payments.
Matt… Boss is asking the question, how can we do this today?
(i am testing multiple tools to see if they work or not and asking therm if they violate GWG… and she keeps asking me for this one thing.. BUT.. i told her we can’t violate the GWG rules… HELP!)
Thanks for the answer. But sounds like Google is really helpless. I happed to have that problem (big penalty) and there wasn’t even a simple hint in the Webmaster Tools. What should I do when I must/want that particular domain because it’s my name/trademark/… ?
I am sorry but for me it sounds like Google did surrender to the spammers but not solving the problem in order to help us “normal” guys.
webmasters will always check their rankings, its part and parcel of it. (also gives us something to obsess over)
Sorry Matt, completely missing the point. If we KNOW what keywords convert and we KNOW what keywords generate the highest ROI, why NOT target those keywords? Why not check the progress of that keywords?
I think you miss the point with a lot of your videos completely as you don’t have ROI to measure, you don’t have revenue generating keywords that you need to track. You should bear this in mind when doing future videos.
I notice that you didn’t even mention the search API?
@redflymarketing thumbs up but i don’t think he is missing the point…just remember he is working FOR GOOGLE so he has to be political.