How to understand a site's current ranking
-
I know this is basic stuff, so sorry for the beginners post...
I offer primarily web design services, and I need to know when taking on a new client, how can I assess the current 'lay of the land' for their site in terms of their SEO? I have had some issues in the past where launching a new design negatively affected their performance for their keywords, and obviously I would like to avoid this in future without having to go to 3rd parties.
In particular I have an issue where the client themselves are very bad at giving information about what keywords they currently rank for, and what SEO activities they may have done in the past. How can I make these assessments myself?
thanks for any help
p
-
Google Analytics is King!
-
As the others have said, Analytics for sure. In addition to that, through question and answer with them, you can ferret out the main keywords they want/need to rank for.
In terms of seeing what they rank for right now:
Use Semrush to see what they are raking for right now.
Also, find out who their competitors are and use Semrush to look them up as well.
Hope that helps!
-
Yeah Analytics will contain all their top keyword and you can check their placements with the SEOmoz rank tracker or just searching those keywords in Google yourself. Make sure to pay attention the current websites
,
to X, and meta tags. When doing the new site, use the same tags.
I also recommend getting a second opinion. Look up someone you work with regularly or even post to SEOmoz and get someone to take a second look. It's normal to miss something so a second set of eyes is handy.
-
You need to get access to their analytics and, if it isn't linked, their google webmaster tools logins.
These together will give you the data about their most important landing pages and the terms that are driving traffic. It's not the whole picture, but it is a good starting point.
Additionally I would look at what pages have external links and ensure those get 301 redirected too.
You are right to be concerned by this. I am currently monitoring an international brand who have just made a massive SEO fail on their re-design. They're loosing 10% of their search visibility every 3 days at the moment and do not appear to be aware of this. That also shows how important it is to keep monitoring both analytics and error logs post launch.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to understand if a certain company doing SEO or not?
Hi guys, I am wondering how we can tell that the certain company doing SEO or not?
Competitive Research | | ahmetkul0 -
Improve rankings
Hello, My website is www.polarpos.com I am trying to improve its ranking for "pos system" my main competitor is: www.barcodesinc.com I have looked through their backlinks but they seem to be random, not many being particularly specific to "pos systems". So what can I do to better compete with this website regarding their keyword? Where can I get the backlinks to my website that would help it for that ranking and in what way?
Competitive Research | | vkpolar0 -
Why is this site ranking higher?!
I'm trying to figure out why www.lvimmigrationattorney.com would be ranking higher on several keywords than www.immigrationlawnv.com. It doesn't make sense to me because the latter site has a higher page authority and mozrank, as well as more followed links. The domain authority from the linking sites to each site are pretty close. I'm sure I'm missing something, but I can't put my finger on it. Any idea?
Competitive Research | | atstickel120 -
Anybody here look at Alexa Rank and or PageRank when doing research?
Any Seo'ers out there still looking at PageRank and or Alexa Rank? Any suggestions on how to look at these stats? I personally believe both are not relevant in todays SEO researches. I'm i very wrong?
Competitive Research | | PrizeWize0 -
Using Semantic Language to rank, how much stock do you put into this? (LSI)
In theory, analyzing the top results for a given phrase and comparing the common words and phrases would indicate what google considers relative language to the query. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was and still is a buzz phrase for some SEOs. But how much stock do you give to the idea that if you can determine the common language for top rankers and then duplicate that language and density of common words that your website will then rank for that query you desire? Has anyone here tested the theory of using semantic language from the results themselves to better rank?
Competitive Research | | Thos0030 -
Identify keywords certain sites target
Hello, I've been asked to identify what keywords a group of blogs/communities might target so that we might gain some insight for our own SEM purposes. It's been several years since I used SEOmoz's tools, so they have changed a lot. I couldn't remember if you had such a tool, but it appears you do not--or at least not that I am finding. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of such a tool where I can input a subdomain, and have a report stating which keywords are the ones the domain rates highly for. To be clear: I'm not looking for a traffic estimation or anything; simply a breakdown of what keywords a specific page or domain support most. P.S. I did a search on here for certain terms like "competitive keyword targets" and so forth, and saw no matching QA. I'm sorry if there is a duplicate! Thanks,
Competitive Research | | krisgosser
Kris0 -
Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Keywords in URL structure for Large Site
We are creating a national real estate website which will contain 2mil+ listings. Our aim is to compete with the National leaders in the field. We are trying to lock down a url structure and it basically comes down to if we should put a major keyword in the url structure or not. The structure would have regional keywords naturally. Its the addition of a more descriptive key word which is in question. Our domain name has no keywords in it. For the sake of this example, we would be targeting "city real estate"... oursite.com/real-estate/state/city/ or oursite.com/state/city/ Here is what the big sites use as an example: http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/New-York-NY/ http://www.trulia.com/NY/New_York/ http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/New_York-New_York/ http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/New-York Id love to not have to throw keywords in there and be as clean as possible but i also dont want to shoot myself in the foot. The big boys do add additional keywords in the url, does that mean we should? Id much rather be a leader than a follower but again, I dont want to mess this up from the start and these guys have probably tested this (or have they?). Input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | cobbsfriedman0