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When
tracking how well you're doing against competitors in Google
are you winning, losing or just holding your own?
Don't
know? Doesn't surprise me.
Most
have no clue if they're winning the Google rankings
battle much less the war. Which is a shame since keeping score
is so simple. Here's all you do.
Identify
the Competition
Track Page Rank
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. Here's how to do it.
**
Identify Your Competitors
Not hard. Just identify the top 5 competitors in your niche
you want to outrank.
** Track Page Rank (PR)
Pick the two or three "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' home pages plus the two or
three other pages optimized for those competitive keywords
you picked.
Note
the PR of each 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 some guessimate for how
many pages 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 -
at least track the pages in Google.
** Gauge Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
It's a cinch if you use FAST to get the number or quantity
of inbound links since they're more inclusive.
Google
on the other hand will only reveal in bound links from PR
4 sites or higher. BAM! There's your take on quality.
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 are returned.
Do
the same with Google.
Record
the count of all links plus high quality links on your spreadsheet.
(Be sure to subtract the internal links from pages in the
website in question.)
** Track Traffic
Use either Alexa's Toolbar <http://download.alexa.com>
or visit Alexa <http://www.alexa.com>
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 traffic rank.
Then
to close the loop.
**
Keep an Eye on Them
Use a page monitoring service to watch competitor sites like
a hawk. Sure some would call this spying. But that has such
a negative connotation. I prefer monitoring. Here's the free
tool to use that makes this automatic.
Change
Detect <http://www.changedetect.com> will email you
whenever a site it's monitoring for you changes.
This
gives you yet one more way to track if the webmaster is actively
improving their site or asleep at the switch.
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.
Look.
Don't be blindsided like a frog in water on the stove. Who
will boil to death because he doesn't detect what's going
on.
**
Track your closest rivals.
** Compare your stats to theirs.
** Re-act accordingly.
It's
easy and doesn't take more than 20-30 minutes a week given
the tools revealed. Yet doing so gives you the marketing intelligence
you need to improve your Google ranking or hold your own.
No matter what your competitors are doing.
Resource
Box:
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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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Read more
about web site positioning:
Beginner's
Google SEO guide
Website
ranking in 7 days
Google
Pagerank and how to get it
Higher
search engine ranks
Are
you winning or losing in Google?
Google
Adwords guide
Complete
website optimization
Rank
high in Google
Improved
search engine ranks
Getting
your website listed
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