Internet marketing is all about ranking in the search engines, getting seen on social and about a million other traffic generating bits. Today we are going to talk about how to check up on how all that effort is working!
There are three sites I use to check on my website’s status: Moz – Open Site Explorer, Alexa and SEMRush. These three tools will help give you a good idea of your site’s ranking authority and what you can do to increase your status.
Moz – Open Site Explorer
This site will give you a quantitative number from 1-100 about your site’s authority. To give you an idea, YouTube and Pinterest have 100, our Marketing and Media Monsters site that is less than a year old has 34. This site has 49.
Open Site Explorer is generally about checking what kinds of links you have back to your website and supplying a ranking based on that number. Now, what does that mean? Well, Marketing Artfully has pretty good authority and when I post something, it tends to get ranked pretty well in the search engines compared to when I post something on MandM Monsters. That said, there are things that you can do to increase this number.
Links – from what I can see, regular links from directory sites like AllTop count as well as no follow links from other blogs. How do you get no follow links from other sites? Comments! I have made comments on a number of sites that I like and follow. While no follow links don’t help on Google, it does seem to impact this report. When I look at this I am inspired to get out there and make more links.
Top pages – this is the pages that have the highest authority by links (no by numbers of hits as the pages that Open Site Explorer lists are not the pages that Google shows I have traffic for!)
Linking domains – Shows the sites with the most authority that link to you! Now, most of mine come from posts and videos that I have shared places like YouTube, Pinterest and Feedburner (how I aggregate my RSS feed). The nice thing about this is that if you are doing social, these things are probably working for you already!
Anchor text – This is where some people got in trouble with Google for trying to manipulate anchor text backlinks. You need to have a nice mix…A LOT of mine come from “Tara Jacobsen” which makes sense as those are probably blog comments and a fair number come from Marketing Artfully. What you will see if you have spammy link building going on is a lot of “small business marketing” and “entrepreneur marketing” instead. If OSE can figure this out, you know that Google can too! Stop spammy link building right now and just work on getting true backlinks to your website!
Alexa
Alexa has some really good data, including where your site ranks in the world. Today I am number 44,978 in the US. Just recently that number has been going down (which is a good thing in this case – google is number one, youtube two, etc.)
General stats – Alexa tracks the bounce rate for your site (how fast people come and leave), how many pages each visitor looks at while they are there and how long they stay on your site. You can change each of these yourself by making sure you site loads faster, having your headlines match your content (having AMAZING content is a given) and having other things to do once you have them there. I use a plugin called “Just another related posts plugin” which gives them similar posts to the ones that they are looking at.
Audience Demographics – This is what I love the most! Here they tell you about what your readers look like. Mine are generally female, with a college education and browse at work. This makes sense because I do not “dumb it down” and write at a fifth grade level like everyone says I should and my traffic is abysmal on the weekends compared to during the week.
Search Terms – One last bit I like here is that they give me search terms that are used to find my site. These are often different than the ones I get from google and so are a great place to look for blog posts I should write in the future.
SEMRush
Last but not least is SEMRush. These guys will tell you the search terms that you are ranking for by position. According to them my best number one term is for Customer Demographics, which matches the info that I get from google showing that is a top incoming search term that people use.
Keywords – To me this is best thing about them. When you see the keywords that you rank for and want to move up, you can write more posts about that topic or make sure that you have social links to the post that ranks well. Many times I think business people think that one blog post is going to get you ranked for a keyword, but actually it is cumulative. If you have 5 posts about a topic in a category, not all five will be ranked in google BUT the one that is is boosted by the other 4.
Ranking – I watch this pretty closely and if I slip lower for a phrase like “realtor marketing“, I will write a blog post for that and include a link to the post or page that ranks best in google for that keyword (see how I threw that one in…every little bit helps!)
Website Monitoring Tools Wrapup
Alrighty then, hopefully you found some new toys to play with today. Using these website monitoring tools to keep an eye on your website is a great way to make sure you are headed in the right direction overall!
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