Different ways of measuring search engine rankings

Reporting is very important when it comes to providing SEO services, and one of the most time consuming parts of reporting is checking the positions in the search engines.

Even more so than checking for PR, there are lots of methods / tools available for checking a websites position in the search engines results. To help save time and speed up the process of reporting I have had a look at some of the most popular types of position reporting.

The obvious way

Take your keywords and search for them one by one in all the search engines you are reporting on. Even if you only cover the three major search engines this is still a nightmare. Trying to locate the websites can be tricky and not to mention the problem that personalised search can bring to the party.

SEO book rank checker for Firefox

Nice and easy to use with a human emulation delay to avoid any trouble automated searches can create on your IP (supposedly). The downside is the human emulation delay can lead to quite a long process to get hold of your rankings but this can be turned off. It allows you to export the results and best of all it’s free to download. I have noticed that the rank checker does have problems when the results include other search results such as local listings or image results. Be aware of this when using.

Link Assistants rank checker

I did download this to try out the demo version and I have to admit I was very impressed with the amount of flexibility this software provides. It seems to be very accurate and very quick, allowing you to tailor searches to pretty much all the international search engines you can think of (both locally and globally). The downside is that it doesn’t report past the first 100 search results, which I know isn’t that important as these won’t be getting any traffic but clients are likely to want to know where they rank and if any improvement are being made even early on in the campaign.

These are the methods and tools I use to check my rankings; I haven’t found a need for others as these seem to do a very reliable job when used in the right combination. If anyone has experience or recommendations of other kinds of software please let me know in the comments and I will check them out.

Did you know that when you link to one of my posts I aim to provide a search engine friendly, contextual link back to your website where possible? Also after a couple of relevant comments your links will be approved as dofollowed. Why wait to get involved?