The aim of this post is to give you a gauge of the most important SEO metric for your website – your search engine rankings. Often, we find ourselves searching for our keywords on Google to see where we rank. That gives us a binary result – a ‘yes/no answer’ i.e. you’re either ranking well or not. But while performing this periodic ritual, we miss recording something more valuable. And what’s that?
Imagine you’re playing a game – and all your rankings in that game are put up on a scoreboard, next to your competition. The score-keeper runs some calculations on the rankings, and comes up with a total score for each contender. Those scores are then put up on a totem pole (a pole where ranks are put in order from top to bottom), so you know exactly who’s winning & who’s losing. You then track this score over-time to witness your improvement (or decline); and make changes to your SEO strategy when necessary. Such a score would arm you with precise knowledge of your competitive rankings & tell you where you stand on Google in one go, wouldn’t you agree?
That’s the concept behind RankScore, and that’s why I feel it is important to share it with you. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to determine your own RankScore (with the help of a simple Excel sheet), and know the RankScore of your competitors too. You ready? Let’s jump right into it then.
Step 1: List your Keywords
In the first step, simply list down all your keywords together (preferably in an excel sheet). In the next column, write down your website name/URL, and highlight the whole column.
Tip: the more keywords you enter, the more awesome analysis you’ll get
Step 2: Know your Competition
This is important! You need to know who you’re competing against. If you already know your top 3 competitors (atleast), skip this step. If you don’t, perform a search on Google for your main keyword, and note down the top 3 competitors. Now, enter them next to your website like this:
Step 3: Find thy Standing
Where do you rank on Google? More importantly, where does your competition rank? Let’s get searching! To do this, you can either use free tools available online that allow you to check your rank on Google, or do it manually yourself. What we’re trying to do here is fill in that sheet with actual data that can be used for our analysis in the next step. The final version may look something like this:
Step 4: Analyze
Done checking your rankings for all keywords? Great! It’s time for your hard-work to pay off! The first thing you should do is find out your average rankings. This will tell you the exact number of #1’s, Top 10s, Top 30s & Top 100s you have. The formula I use to calculate this is:
=COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)
The above formula will tell you the number of Top 10s that are present within a keyword cell range. To put this in your sheet, simply change the B3:B6 to your keyword cell range, and “<=10″ to whatever criteria you want to apply (for eg: “=1″ for to find the number of Position 1s).
Next, let’s run a formula to get the actual rankScore. For the sake of simplicity, here’s a formula you can use right away:
=(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “=1″)*5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=3″)*4)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)*3.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=30″)*2.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=50″)*1.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=70″)*1)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=100″)*0.5)
Put this formula below all your rankings and replace the “B3:B6” with the range of your keyword cells. This formula basically counts all your rankings, gives a specific score to each position range (for eg: 5 points if you are #1 for a keyword), and then sums it up for all keywords. There it is, your RankScore! This is how it all looks at my end:
Step 5: Take Action!
Yep, about time! Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to think about your future steps & the action you’re going to take on them. If you have a lower score vis-à-vis your competition, change your SEO strategy. For more insight, compare your averages too (your number of #1s, Top 10s etc.). If you fare great on both these aspects, great job – be proud of yourself!
Read more: arrowhitech.com, mage-shop.com
No comments:
Post a Comment