I have been looking for a good way to keep track of how my sites are ranking in Google for various terms. Specifically, I need a way to see what terms I’m ranking for and what position they hold and compare that with the past. In particular I want a good way to keep track of unexpected keywords that I’m almost ranking well for and that with a little tweaking to my content could get a better position and pull in a significantly higher percentage of traffic.
For example, on this site my current website ranking is at position 11 in Google for the term “hover mower“. I wrote a brief article about hover mowers recently and position 11 puts me at the top of page two on Google. Since most people tend to click on results in page one, I could probably get significantly more traffic to my page if I could raise my placement by 3 or 4 places.
Now, “hover mower” wasn’t something I specifically set out to try to rank for. I just wrote the post based on something I thought was interesting and it happened to be a niche where I could rank fairly well without doing anything intentional. However, now that I see there is potential for that search phrase, I want to see if I can optimize things to bring in more traffic for that term. Optimization could simply mean fleshing out a brief post into a longer article or tweaking the text to include the keyword a few more times. In this review I’m not going to get into that part of things. The purpose of this post is to look at the tool that I’m using to keep track of the rankings for a variety of different terms.
Keeping track of a bunch of keywords like this can be a bit daunting. If you want to keep track of terms in multiple search engine ranking, it becomes even more difficult. That is where Advanced Web Ranking by Caphyon comes into play. It can keep track of hundreds of keywords for one or more sites and show you how they rank in different search engines. For me, the most important part is that as you use the tool, it keeps track of the historical ranking so you can see if you are improving things or making them worse.
This isn’t going to be a complete review of Advanced Web Ranking. It is powerful software and I’m only using a small portion of what it is capable of. Instead I’m going to focus on specifically how I use it. I’m saying this because I don’t want you to think that it can’t do something just because I don’t mention it here. I’m focusing on a very small subset of features that I personally use or plan to use.
AWR lets you create multiple projects and save them. If you have multiple websites, you might create one for each website. If you have multiple website rankings that are targeting various subjects, it might be better to organize projects by subject matter. Each project consists of:
- list of your websites (or a single website)
- list keywords
- list of search engines you want to check against.
Most of the controls are shown in the above screen shot. When you click on “update project”Advanced Web Ranking looks at the first 50 results from each search engine and notes if any of your websites show up for those terms. This information is recorded and you can look at the results as a graph or table. The system does a good job of showing you what has changed and which direction it went. It looks like you can also set it to automatically email you a report showing reports and you can also schedule the updates to run automatically, but I haven’t needed those options yet.
The update process can take a very long time–particularly because the system has to act like a human and not simply request 100 documents from a search engine in rapid succession. The updates can be scheduled to run automatically as well so you don’t have to click the button every day.
One of the most attractive features of Advanced Web Ranking is the fact that it is multi-platform. There are versions for OS X, Linux and Windows. I started out using it on OS X, but plan to switch over to a Linux machine where I can leave it running and automatically updating without running on my laptop.
Keywords
The keyword research tool shows and compares the keyword density of two pages. This can be an easy way to pick the keywords you want to track and add them to the list of keywords to query. This is probably useful if you are wanting to track specific keywords in the text you’ve written. It is also helpful to look for writing or website patterns that might be hurting your site. For example, I’ve found that the words “read the full article” has a very high density on most of my home pages. This doesn’t really add any value to the reader or search engines when it comes to understanding what the content of the rest of the article is about. I can customize this text on an article by article basis. It is a minor change, but I can use it to help tune my site for important keywords.
The keyword tool also showed me that some sites place far to much emphasis on the months of the year. Every page had a list of archived posts and a significant amount of text on each page was dedicated to simply listing the months of the year. I was able to tweak this on a few sites and am looking at ways o improve it on others. Once again this is something I wouldn’t have noticed without the keyword tool.
The keyword tool from Advanced Web Ranking also makes it easy to identify writing patterns that you might otherwise miss. This may or may not help you with search engine ranking, but it can help make your writing more engaging and less monotonous.
AWR has several different ways to enter the keywords you want to track. It doesn’t automatically know all the keywords in your website ranking for and there may be a number of keywords that are unimportant and don’t need tracked. If you want to see how you rank for everything, your best bet is probably to get the keywords from Google Analytics or whatever analytics package you are using. That will let you find the keywords that are actually sending people to your site rather than guessing.
I found that the best way to export the keywords from Google Analytics is to create a CSV file, open it in Excel, and then copy the column with the keywords into it and paste it into Advanced Web Ranking in the box where you can normally type the keywords in one at a time. AWR has the ability to read CSV files, but Google Analytics usually sends a bunch other information along in the file. By the time you clean it up, it is quicker to simply copy the data and paste it in.
Top Sites
“Top Sites” is a useful feature of AWR. For any keyword and search engine combination you can see a lit of the websites that make up the top ranking. This makes it easy to see what sites are ranking better than yours. As you can see below, my ranking for the term “hover mower” moved up to position 9 while I was writing this article.
This view is particularly useful if you have multiple site that you are trying to get to rank for the same keyword. You can take some of your competition and use them as part of a keyword comparison to see how your text density and keywords compares to theirs.
Proxy & Datacenters
As I mentioned, AWR tries to act like a human when it comes to pulling information from Google and other search engines. If you need to do updates faster than this, it is possible to use proxy servers and run multiple updates in parallel. This means your search engine requests will come from multiple ip addresses. You can pull down more information without getting any of the ip addresses banned or throttled by the search engines.
In addition, the software lets you view the results from various Google datacenters and you can also do a search as if you were in a particular geographic region to see what the local search results look like.
Other features
I’m primarily using AWR to look at Google placement. However, it supports over 1000 other search engines as well.
You can setup reports with specific triggers so you only see data that has changed in a certain way. For example, if you are tracking 1000 keywords a report that shows everything is going to be a bit difficult to use. However a report that is “triggered” only by changes in rankings might be very useful. So you only see the terms where your ranking has changed.
AWR can use the Yahoo and Google API’s to speed up the requests. You can enter multiple API keys to keep from hitting the daily limits.
Things I’d like to see
I’d really like to see a product like AWR that integrates with Google Analytics and perhaps the Google Webmaster tools. Knowing how your site ranks for each keyword is helpful, but it would be nice to understand the value of each keyword. For example, being able to see your rank position and how much traffic that keyword has sent you over time would be helpful. It would also be nice to see the number of searches that are performed for that keyword each month. For example, lets say I saw that I was ranking at number 11 for “hover mower” and getting 500 hits per month. Two months from now, if I was ranking at position 7, it would be nice to be able to immediately see how that changed the amount of traffic I was receiving for the term. Is a position of 11 (first item on page two) better than position 10 (last item on page one)? This can be done by cross referencing the data from AWR with Google Analytics, but it would be nice if it were all in one place. I’m pretty sure the Google Analytics API could be used to pull this data out and into AWR or some other tool.
Conclusion
I’m very happy with Advanced Web Ranking. There is a 30 day free trial, so if you have any interest at all, it is worth trying it out to see what you think.
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