Are You Winning or Losing In Google?
by John Gergye
When comparing how you’re doing against competitors in Google,
are you winning, losing or just holding your own?
Don’t know? Doesn’t surprise me.
For awhile I didn’t know either. Sure I was keeping an eye on
what I THOUGHT was my prime competitor. Only thing is before
I started keeping track, I didn’t realize he was more or less
drifting off into the sunset. Or, that there were two newer
sites I should have been watching. Ooops.
So yes, most of us have no clue if we’re winning the Google
rankings battle much less the war. Yet I’ve discovered keeping
score is so simple. Here’s all you need to do:
Identify the Competition
Track PageRank
Ferret Out How Many Pages in Google
Gauge Both Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Track Traffic
Keep an Eye on Them
That’s it. That’s all that counts really. To start...
:: Identify Your Competitors
Not hard. Just identify the top 5 competitors in your niche that
you want to outrank.
One way to do that, is to take the five or six keyword phrases
you are looking to rank well for and see who is in the top 10
for each. Since anyone can rank well for one keyword, doing
this for multiple keywords will spotlight those who show up
repeatedly. This highlights them as the stiffer competition.
Then repeat this every three or four months to make sure no
one new has slipped in under the radar.
:: Track PageRank (PR)
Once again take those same five or six "must-win" keywords you
want to come out on top for.
Use the Google toolbar < http://toolbar.google.com > to track
the PR of competitors’ pages optimized for those prime keywords.
Google Toolbar Tip: I realize some have no clue on how to coax
Google’s tool bar to give up PageRank. So here’s all you do.
Simply hold your cursor in the green bar area itself. Get it in
just the right spot and a little pop up box will appear that
says:
"PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of this
page (4/10)"
In this example the PR is 4.
Note the target keywords and the PR for pages featuring them
on a spreadsheet.
:: How Many Pages in Google?
Again pretty simple if you have this tool:
< http://www.neutralize.com/cmsvp/index.htm >
In the left hand column you’ll see it asks "How well optimized
is your website?"
Now I don’t give a rat’s behind about mine, necessarily, but I
do care about those pesky competitors.
Enter the competitor’s URL.
Stick in a guess-timate for how many pages are on their site.
Hit the "check now" button.
The result will show you how many pages they’ve got in Google,
FAST, altaVista, and Inktomi. While I track all of them - you
should at least track the number of pages in Google.
:: Gauge Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Not all links are created equal in Google’s eyes. Links from
High PR sites are worth more. So you want a read on both the
quantity and quality of your prime competition’s inbound links.
Since it’s more inclusive, you may want to use FAST to find out
the total number or quantity of inbound links.
Here’s how. Using FAST < http://www.alltheweb.com > put:
link:www.competitor.com
in the search box. All pages linking to www.competitor.com
will be returned.
You’ll see something like "1 - 10 of 135 Results for
link:www.competitor.com" at the top of the page of FAST
listings which would tell you there are 135 sites that link
to that site.
Google on the other hand will only reveal inbound links from
sites with a PR 4, or higher. BAM! There’s your take on quality.
While you can do the same with Google as you did with FAST,
Google makes it even easier.
Go to the advanced search page
Scroll down until you see a heading that says "Page-Specific
Search". Stick www.competitor.com into the search box labeled:
"Links Find pages that link to the page". Click "Search".
At the top of the page of search results you’ll see a result
summary line like the following:
"Searched for pages linking to www.competitor.com.
Results 1 - 10 of about 21."
The above would indicate there 21 high quality links to your
competitor. Subtract the internal links from pages within the
web site in question to determine how many high quality sites
actually link to your competitor.
Record the count of all links, plus high quality external links
on your spreadsheet.
:: Track Traffic
Use either Alexa’s Toolbar < http://download.alexa.com > or
visit Alexa to grab traffic stats.
While far from perfect since it can be manipulated, you can
still get a decent estimate of traffic as measured by users with
the Alexa toolbar visiting the sites.
To keep it simple just track the Alexa traffic rank.
Then to close the loop...
:: Keep an Eye on Them
Use a page monitoring service like Change Detect
< http://www.changedetect.com > to watch competitor sites like
a hawk. This free service makes the process automatic and will
email you whenever the site you're monitoring changes. It gives
you another means of checking whether a competing webmaster is
actively improving his site or asleep at the switch.
Okay, now the easiest way to recognize trends is to graph what’s
going on. You’ll be able to see right away, if the trend is your
friend or not.
If any competitor is getting more of anything, you’re going to
have to match them or risk falling behind. Don’t be blindsided.
** Track your closest rivals.
** Compare your stats to theirs.
** Act or react accordingly.
It’s easy and doesn’t take more than 20-30 minutes a week
with the methods provided above. Doing so gives you the
marketing intelligence you need to improve your Google ranking,
or at least, to hold your own no matter what your competitors
are doing.
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How much is more traffic worth to your business? Take John
Gergye’s Search Engine Quiz and get a special report "Coming
Out On Top" with 49 tools that make it easy to get more traffic.
http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml
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