How to be sure if your website rework really improved the website’s position in search engine results?
How to be sure if your website rework really improved the website’s position in search engine results?
Imagine this. Your company has spent a large amount of money and resources to optimize the company’s website for best possible search engine visibility. The work is now done and the website has been updated. How can you check if your strategy is working? The most rational way is to find out whether your website is really ranking better in search engines? But how do you do that?
Many companies provide automated programs to check Google ranking, but often times they produce the wrong results or are against Google’s guidelines. Yet you still have four ways to get information on page positions.
Manual investigation. The most obvious, but very tedious way is to go through the search results by hand. Manual results are not always completely reliable.
Analytics software. Most web analytics programs, such as Google Analytics, list traffic sources and search engines can be sorted out.
Server logs. Server logs include details on how people enter the site, but accessing and interpreting logs requires technical skill.
Webmaster Tools. Both Google and Bing have webmaster control panel which includes a list all the keywords people use to get to your site. Here are links to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
On Google Webmaster Tools open the website details and select Traffic > Search Queries from the menu on left. You can see average search result positions on this page.
On Bing Webmaster Tools click a web address to open the Traffic Details for that specific page. On the page you can see Avg Search Appearance Position. This is the average position on the search results where your page appeared. A value of 1 indicates that the impression was the first search result; a value 2 indicates it was the second search result, etc.