Your search ranking is an important piece of information about your website. How do you get accurate information about where you sit in the search results?

What does Search Ranking actually mean?

Search Engine ranking is a number that refers to the position your site appears in a list of search results, divided into pages of 10 listings (sometimes referred to as SERPs).

So when I type 'Italian Restaurant' into Google, the websites that have some relevance to this phrase will be listed in the order that Google think shows the most relevant listings first.

If Google thinks a page on your site is the 9th most relevant page, you will appear 9th – which would put you on the first page of results. If your page is the 66th most relevant result, you'll be on page 7.

First page is the ideal because people will only look at the first few pages of results. The higher up the list you are, the more visitors to your website you will get and as a result, more enquires, more sales etc.

What is my search ranking?

One of the fundamental things people don't think about when they ask this question is that their search ranking will be different depending on the search phrase.

You might rank number 1 for 'Italian Restaurant' but number 77 for 'Good pasta restaurant'.

Your ranking will change over time, as you and other site owners add content and links to their sites.

Why is it important that I know my search ranking?

If people can't find your site, you won't get any business from it. It is that simple.

So it stands to reason that if you don't know where your site ranks then you are missing out on a critical piece of information to improve revenue.

How does Google decide where my site is listed?

The short answer is that Google uses a formula (or algorithm) that decides where your website is ranked for a given search term. It's complicated and they won't tell anyone what the formula is.

But there are generally accepted and proven tactics that will improve your search ranking.

For this article, let's just say it can be a) hard work and b) take some time. You can't pay Google* or ask them nicely to be on the front page.

How do I find out what my ranking is?

A lot of people will simply type in the name of their company and see what page they are on.

This approach is flawed for a number of reasons:

1. You need to start with a list of search phrases that your prospective customers use. People will use a large variety of words to find the services you provide – and they may not be the ones you think they do. So you may have 10, 20 or more phrases that are the most common ones people use.
2. You may have to do a lot of searching. Lets say you are on page 8 for a particular phrase – you'll have to scroll through 8 pages of results to find your listing. And you'll need to do this for every phrase and each search engine (ie Bing, Yahoo, Google pages from the web vs pages from New Zealand etc). This gets tiresome very quickly.
3. You'll have to manually add the results into a spreadsheet if you want to track your search ranking fluctuations and improvements over time (and they do change).
4. Google does personalise search results, so you are not going to see a completely accurate picture.

What tool should I use?

1. Free tools

There are free search ranking tools out there, just search 'search ranking tool'.

The problem with these tools are that most only look at google.com, Bing and Yahoo.com.

Which is pretty pointless if you are a small local business in the UK, Australia or New Zealand (or any other country). Google.com is not going to be the engine that their prospective customers use.

SEOBook has a free down-loadable tool for Firefox that doesn't do too bad a job and you can find out your ranking in google.co.nz (but not pages from New Zealand).

2. Google Webmaster Tools

If you are signed up for webmaster tools, you can look under 'Your site on the web' and 'Search Queries'.

However, this report can be a little unhelpful, particularly if your traffic levels are low and you can't specify the terms you are interested in if it's not in the list. If you are ranked lower than 30, it will just tell you "Page 3 +"

3. Paid Tools

There are several software tools you can purchase to avoid having to check your results manually. Many have limited free or trail versions so you can try the software out. If you want to purchase one, most will set you back several hundred dollars with the possibility of ongoing fees to keep the databases up to date.

These tools allow you to check multiple keywords at once, and (importantly) the more sophisticated ones will allow you to specify which country you want results for (ie NZ)

However, some of these tools are violating Google's terms of use by scraping SERP results. Although this will not get your website banned, Google may block your IP address for a while, preventing you from accessing the engine.

Find one (such as SEO PowerSuite) that use API keys to avoid violating search engines policies.

The most popular of these tools include:

• Marketing Samuri
• IBP Promoter
• SEO Elite
• SEO Powersuite
• Web SEO

Each of these will include slightly different mix of tools and purpose but will include any of the following:

• Web site auditing and analysis tools
• Competitor research tools
• Search ranking reporting
• Keyword research tools
• Link building
• Submission tools
• Templated reports

4. Buy a Search Ranking Report

Here at Essentee we run search ranking reports that will save you time and a large cash outlay.

We'll add some recommendations in for you as well so you know where to start to improve your website's search ranking.

In conclusion

If you have the time and/or only want a general idea of where your site sits, then use one of the free tools or do it manually.

If search ranking information is important to the success of your business, you'll need to outlay some cash for a piece of software (or purchase a report).

But this is a small outlay for what is a very important piece of information.

*Unless you are paying for Adwords Ads