How to Track SEO Performance for Multiple Keywords

June 1st, 2008 by sam

As someone who spends lots of time and money acquiring search engine traffic for TeachStreet, I probably get abnormally excited when I see our pages show up on the first page of Google’s organic search results.

Having said that, I’m probably not alone. Nor do I think I was alone last week when I went looking for a tool to track SEO performance for all of our keywords, which in the absence of a good tool, I feared could be a brutal task for a site with 98,000+ indexed pages.

For us, the problem is we don’t just have 5-10 pet keywords. We’re targeting tens of thousands of keywords across hundreds of subjects. Our affinity searches include terms like “piano lessons“ and “tennis coach,” but we also have lexical matches such as “piano lesson,” “tennis coaches,” and searches in other subjects such as “yoga classes” and “geometry tutors.”

So what I needed to figure out was the best way to track SEO performance for all of these keywords.

Though I think this is an area that’s quickly evolving with folks like SEOmoz and Enquisite Pro working hard to create better, more readily available SEO analytics, it’s an area where I’ve found few truly great resources.

One of the best tools I’ve come across, is a free one called Rank Checker.

Rank Checker is a plug-in for Firefox, put out by Aaron Wall of SEOBook, that allows you to see how your site is performing on hundreds of search terms across all three of the major search engines (GOOG, YHOO, and LIVE).

Then, once you’ve run your report, you can save the preset (to repeat week over week) and export the results to CSV.

It’s not a perfect tool, but it’s free and it’s a pretty slick. So if you need a quick, easy to download tool for some rough figures as to how you’re doing on multiple keywords, give Rank Checker a test drive.

Posted in Learn New Things | Comments

  • I wouldn't recommend tracking rankings for those thousdands of long tail keywords. There's just not much you can do with that information. Better to track qualified traffic for long tail categories of keywords and monitor if 1) traffic x bounce rate and 2) conversions for those categories are up or down. You might monitor categories like "tutoring", "piano", "coaching", etc.

    That will not help you keep track of any qualified traffic changes, but will help you monitor volume for those types of keywords (to help you determine if you should adjust your content strategy).

    You can easily do this type of tracking via your analytics program.

    I also suggest using Google Webmaster Tools to check out what queries you're ranking well for but not getting click throughs for as this can help you figure it if you're either accidentally optimizing for the wrong things or if you are close to getting some qualified traffic but just need to make your SERP more compelling.

    When it comes to tracking individual keywords, I generally suggest tracking only up to 10 or so. These are head terms that you get the bulk of your traffic from and want to get the bulk of your traffic from. Store (weekly is often enough) the query, the ranking, and the URL that ranks for the query. That information can help you with diagnosing issues. Don't even pay attention to that data unless you get a traffic drop. If that happens, you can go back to this data and see if you're ranking dropped and if so, if the ranking URL lost ranking or if that URL got de-indexed somehow, etc.

    Other than the diagnosis described above, ranking can be a pretty poor metric. Monitoring traffic is a significantly better metric towards the same end. You can rank highly and get no click through at all if your result isn't compelling or if video/images rank directly below you... not to mention that these days, every searcher may see a different ranking of results. So it's pretty impossible to track anyway.
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