How to monitor your SERPs rankings by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007

To get visitors from search engines, your website's pages need to be listed and seen on page one of Search Engines' Results Pages (SERPs). That means you need to track your sites' SERPs for target keywords. Here’s how.

You can 'manually' find a SERP ranks by searching with the relevant keyword and noting where your site is listed. Eg, for thinkingmanagers again:

For the target keyword ‘business development’, we see from the following image that the site is ranked no 2 out of 117,000,000 sites:

But you can’t manually search for many keywords, and it’s even more work keeping a record of changes in ranking over time, so we turn to software such as WebPosition which will give you neat reports like those shown in the images below.

The following image shows the summary report from WebPosition for thinkingmanagers.com. For 86 monitored keywords it shows how many are ranked No.1, how many are in the top 5, top 10, top 20 and top 30.

The next two images show the tracking of rankings over time for the single keywords – ‘corporate communication’ and ‘business development’.

Also useful are free tools like Rank Checker, a Firefox plug-in.

Have a look at our Search Engine Keywords page for more information on this subject.