Do you check how your websites are ranking for the keywords you are targeting each day?
I used to check the search engine rankings of my websites every day, and I often checked them more than once. If I had optimizing a page to rank for “online poker strategy” I just had to know how it were doing, even if it wouldn’t have any impact on what I would do that day, or even that week.
Knowing how the search results evolve over time, and how your site gain or lose rank, can definitely teach you a lot about SEO. Unfortunately I tend to obsess over metrics, and spend way more time measuring my results than I can justify. This is easy to say when looking back, but only a couple of months ago it seemed extremely important to me to take 20 minutes each day to check how my sites were ranking.
Rank Checking Software
To cut down on the time I “waste” checking how my sites are ranking, I have been using rank checking software for around 2 months. I’m currently using Advanced Web Rankings for the past 1½ month, and really like it, so I will be focusing on that.
Rank Checker (SEO Book)
I first started out using Rank Checker from SEO Book. I think it is a good program (especially since it is free), but unfortunately it turned out to be a bit too light weight for me.
Advanced Web Ranking (Caphyon)
I’m currently using Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) from Caphyon, which is very easy to use, and show pretty graphs like the one below.
Graph showing historical Google rankings for 3 of my websites.
The graph doesn’t really do the program justice, since the true value comes from looking at it in relation to other data, like the amount of traffic your site received from specific keywords or what you did that could have caused the shift in rankings.
One of the things I really like about having easy access to a graph of my sites historical rankings, is that I know that if one of my sites suddenly gain or drop dramatically in the rankings, I will be able to go back and see exactly when it happened. This is especially useful for when you build a site and then just let it sit for a couple of months while working on other projects.
Sometimes I see that one of my “sleeper sites” has received a lot of traffic for a certain keyword. This could either mean that the site has been ranking very well for that particular keyword, or that there has been more people searching for it. Without having access to historical data showing the sites rankings.
A very handy feature of AWR that some may take for granted, is that you can schedule it to automatically gather new data each day. This may not be a big deal to some of you, but I find it extremely useful, since it has enabled me to stop worrying about how my website are ranking, since I know that I can always just check it in AWR.
In addition AWR can also create backups of your data automatically, and if you combine it with an online backup program like Mozy, the only thing you will have to do is check if your computer are up and running. Everything else will take care of itself, while you focus on improving your websites.
Download Advanced Web Ranking (30 day free trial)
Can Using AWR Get You in Trouble With The Search Engines?
I always get a little bit concerned when I go from doing something myself to having it done automatically, especially when it comes to SEO.
Fortunately Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web has done a bit of research on how AWR collect it’s data in his review of AWR, and it turns out that Caphyon has done as much humanly possible to make the program safe to use.
Advanced Web Ranking is written in such a way that its operation is indistinguishable from that of a browser. This was done for two reasons: results accuracy and respect for the search engine’s resources. (source)
Please note that if you do 2.000 searches on the same keywords each day between 8 and 10 AM, it is probably pretty transparent what you are doing. So if you are worried about being “profiled as a webmaster”, you may want to use one or more proxies.
AWR support the use of proxies, and can even use multiple proxies simultaneously. According to the documentation, using multiple proxies will actually speed up the data gathering process, since AWR can then send more queries at a time (if anybody can hook me up with some cheap US based proxies, I would love to hear from you).
Download Advanced Web Ranking (30 day free trial)
Edit: AWR indclude a keyword research tool, which is basically just a built in browser window showing the external keyword tool from Google Adwords, with a plugin that allow you to easily import the keywords into AWR.
Below I have written a bit about AWR’s “cousin” Advanced Link Manager, since it can do something that I have seen a lot of people ask for: Monitor link exchanges.
Advanced Link Manager
I haven’t been using Advanced Link Manager for as long as Advanced Web Ranking, since I only learned about it recently.
Advanced Link Manager (ALM) is basically a program that will gather data about backlinks to your own as well as your competitors websites using various search engines (you can choose which ones).
ALM has a lot of features, but the ones that strike me most useful is the ability to monitor link exchanges, so you can easily see if someone you have done an exchange with has has taken down your link, or if you have accidentally removed his link.
It is easy to add new link exchanges that should be monitored.
“Unfortunately” I have never actually made a formal link exchange, so I haven’t really been using that part of ALM. Instead I have spend my time poking around with the historical overview of backlinks for your website and the link text analyzer.
Both are interesting, but since I’m not a big link builder, and have only been using the program for a short while, I can’t go into details about how useful those features are.
Some of the features did remind me of the Shoemoney tools, so if you found those useful I think you should definitely take a look at ALM.
“Link popularity” – Overview of the 5 most common anchors on backlinks to www.unknownwebmaster.com.
Overall I think that Advanced Web Ranking is a much more useful tool than Advanced Link Manager, but those of you who spend a lot of time analyzing backlink profiles and doing link exchanges may want to take ALM for a spin, since you may find more use for it that I did.
With that said, I do think that I will be using ALM to monitor the development of the backlink profile for some of my sites – Who knows, the data may come in handy one day.
Download Advanced Link Manager (30 day free trial)
Fine Print
The reason this post doesn’t contain affiliate links is that I will be getting a free enterprise license to AWR, which means that I will save 400$ when buying the server edition.
I would love to hear from you if
- You have experience with AWR or another rank checking tool.
- You are able to talk me out of spending ca. 1.000$ on a server with the sole purpose of running AWR.