Before looking for search engine optimisation services or even consulting SEO experts of any kind, it’s a good idea to have an accurate and complete picture of how well your site is doing. The same is true if you’re not considering an SEO agency but want to start your own campaign of improvements in the hope of doing better in the rankings, getting more customers, and ultimately making more money. It’s important to establish a baseline so you can measure any gains that you or your hired SEO experts make. Of course, knowing which aspects of your website are working and ranking well also means you won’t end up doing work you don’t need to do. If you are already ranking well for some keywords, for example, then you’re better off focussing your attention elsewhere.
The first thing to do is establish a concrete list of search phrases you either think your site should rank highly for or you’d like to do well on in the future. These keywords should make up the bulk of the content topics on site, but for now let’s concentrate on measuring performance.
There are SEO tools out there that will help you find out how well you rank in Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches for a list of input terms, but be careful when using these. Many of them are not 100% accurate and any that are hosted in the USA will probably return much poorer rankings than your site actually has, because the results will be based on the search engine results pages a person in the US would see- a different picture to what you’d get in the UK. If you don’t have a huge number of keywords, you can simply do some Google searches by hand. Note down exactly where your site appears for each search, or at least the page number. If you’re not on page one or at least page two, the chances of anyone finding your site through that search are very small.
Next, pop your URL into a few free SEO tools and see what comes out. If possible, export and save the results so you can compare them against future figures. Pay particular attention to metrics like PageRank (or Toolbar PageRank) and Alexa Rank. These, along with the set of current search engine rankings, will form the core of your performance statistics. It’s also possible to collect quite a lot of data on your competitors with the same tools. This is worth doing at least once. You can also include overall site traffic or traffic to specific pages if you have Google Analytics or another web analytics package set up.
Now it’s time to get down to the business of SEO- link building, content generation, and social media work. Collect your rankings and metrics again in a month or so and see how they’ve changed. SEO takes time, and you shouldn’t expect any changes to manifest themselves overnight. If your SEO campaign is effective you should see steady improvement over time and all the benefits that come with ranking well.
