Are You Winning Or Losing In Google?

By Author: John Gergye
Total Articles: 6
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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.
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** 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 MSN or HotBot 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 MSN http://search.msn.com stick:

domainlink:www.competitor.com

in the search box. All pages linking to www.competitor.com
are returned.

Do the same with Google for higher PR links. Using

link:www.competitor.com

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. And
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.

About the author:

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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