Step Wise SEO

It is important to understand the ranking performance of any given website to get a feel for current performance.

Whether a strategy is looking to engage in PFP, PFI or organic search a clear and concise understanding of a website’s current position and, more importantly under which terms, is important.

There are many different types of rankings tools available; however, it is the application of these tools for researching the market space which is key to this article.

Rankings tools
Rankings tools, such as Web Position GoldTM or Advanced Web Ranking give accurate positioning reports of websites against nominated URLs.

It is important to investigate any rankings tool when making a decision to use one. In many instances the search engines recognize certain URLs or IP Addresses and isolate them as being spammers or non-searchers.

The two listed above are credible companies but there are a host of services that might result in a website being blacklisted.

Competitive positioning tools
One of the major challenges of any rankings tool is to determine rankings against appropriate keywords.

If the user isn’t sure of the terms that a searcher uses, on many occasions the keywords entered into a rankings tool may pass back better or worse results than reflects the reality.

This commonly manifests itself in the form of ‘internal’ words or terminology the company or firm uses for products and services, which are usually nothing like the words and phrases searchers use.

There are two ways to overcome this problem: the first is to use the keyword suggestion tools to get a strong list and the second is to use a competitive positioning tool to see not only one website’s rankings but a number of other sites, plus additional search terms, that one site might be ranked on that the others aren’t.

Keywords: Rankings tools, Competitive positioning tools,