What with all the recent Google Panda and Penguin updates going on at the moment and for the foreseeable future it is becoming increasingly important to be able to track the ranking of your sites in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for all the keywords you are targeting.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know I use a tool called Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) to track how my sites are doing in the search engines. With this application you can create unlimited projects for your websites and then in each project you can enter as many keywords as you like for AWR to look for. You can choose from a massive list of search engines to check. Most of my sites are setup to target the UK and as you can choose local versions of search engines such as Google.co.uk it works well with my current portfolio of sites although since the recent Google updates the results haven’t made very happy reading and although they say ignorance is bliss sometimes its better to know the truth!
New Features in Version 8.9
Now, AWR has been around a while but the recent upgrades have included a lot more ways to keep track of your sites positions and presence on the internet. Ranking in Google is still the best way to get exposure for your website but as social media services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google +1 increase in popularity they are becoming great sources of traffic in their own right. To keep up with the times AWR has thankfully included ways to track your sites positioning and mentions on these emerging platforms. You can now do the following:
- Track social shares for your webpages
- Measure the performance of your Facebook Fan pages
- Monitor your Twitter accounts
All this data is monitored over time allowing you to see your social performance as it evolves much as you can do with your keyword tracking.
Competition Analysis in Advanced Web Ranking
Being able to see what competition you are up against in your niche is pretty handy. There are tools dedicated to just this job such as SECockpit, Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro but you can see how weak or strong the top 10 sites in Google are for a particular keyword from inside AWR. Being able to see some in-depth stats on the difficulty of a keyword is an essential ability to have access to. If you fail to do keyword research properly before starting the chances of making you way to page one in Google are pretty slim no matter how good your content or backlinks are.
Link Tracking
You can also use AWR to analyse the links that are pointing at your site using the data from SEOmoz. This is a great way to see how your backlink profile is looking and get a heads up if any of your backlinks have suddenly disappeared as they might have done if you were using Build My Rank before it got de-indexed by Google. You can also see how many times your keywords appears in the anchor text for the links pointing back to you sites. This will become increasingly popular in the months post-Penguin.
Since the updates to AWR the link reports now can help you keep tabs on the following types of data:
- Most Effective Backlinks – see which links are helping your competitors rank
- Anchor Text Diversity – see how your competitors are using their keywords in their link text
- Links Quality – Get an overall view of your competitors’ link profiles and how well they are rated
- Buffer Sites – See which of the sites and domains that link to your competitors’ sites have got lots of backlinks
There is no doubt that Advanced Web Ranking is an essential tool in my internet marketing arsenal. Its good to see how many new features have been added since I started using it such as the social metrics tracking, competition analysis and the keyword research modules and it can now be considered as a complete seo software application. It is a big application that is for sure but it still manages to run OK on my Samsung netbook. You can stick it on a server if you want it to run externally from your main computer and this is something I would like to setup one day. You can schedule AWR to run at set times so you can set it and forget it and just get the reports sent to you. The only problem with this tool is that it does get a bit addictive and you can end up having it constantly running in the background, checking all you sites but at least it is hands off and saves you the time and effort of going into Google and trying to find you site in the SERPS!
How to Track your Site’s Rankings in Google is a post from: How I Got Rich