Why to constantly keep track of your targeted SERPs? When done regularly and properly, this analysis may help you with your most important SEO campaign challenges. By tracking your targeted keyword search engine results, you will:
- learn new emerging SEO techniques;
- keep track of your well established competitors;
- timely spot your new competitors and their tactics;
- watch blackhat techniques and learn how long their effect lasts;
- learn how recent SE algorithmical changes influenced your competitors;
- define who of your competitors to learn from;
How to monitor SERPs?
I’ve been trying multiple (mostly paid) tools and none of them is perfect. I won’t review them here. There is one nice free online tool that can be effectively used to track organic search results for the unlimited number of projects and domains - SerpArchive. Developed by Russian programmers, it has a great variety of features that are a real fun to play with. Some of them are broken at times (like Google PR-tracking feature) but the main (and my favorite) one is working fine.
So how to use it? All you need to do is to create a project (I keep one per domain) and add your keywords (all you want to track). And that’s it. Now all you have to do is to check back now and then to see and compare the results. Here is how the results page for each monitored keyword looks like:
That’s an exact copy of regular Google results page enhanced by the rankings history of each site (to the right of each result). The ranking history will show you the snapshot of each site rankings over the last five days:
In this case the site rankings were changing dramatically: first it was #29, on the next day it lost 7 positions and then got to #8 in a day (after this sudden boost it disappeared from top 100 results at all). Do you feel you should definitely look into this site deeper? - Yeah, you bet! An interesting case, isn’t it? You can also look into a longer period of time - here is what each individual result history page looks like:
Here you can choose the period of time to analyze (start-end report date) and see the results in a handy format:
- date;
- Google rank: black for neutral (if the rank hasn’t changed compared with the previous one), green for positive change and red for negative change;
- change = number of points lost/gained.
Plenty of data to analyze and learn from!
Some bonus features to make your life even easier:
- Use sorting feature to view only new results (those that were not in top 100 previously);
- Bookmark your own sites (or sites that caught your attention) to track only them;
- Export the results to Excel to play with titles and URLs.
And which (free/paid) tool are you using to keep track of your own or your competitor’s rankings?
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Comments
24 responses so far ↓
Ashish Mohta on Mar 10, 2008 at 11:28 am
This is so very important. I generally do when traffic lowers down but its all cumbersome process.
I tried registering there. even though i am using the english version it still gives me russian error message when i try to register. How to figure it
Ann Smarty on Mar 10, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I just tried to register there again, all I got was a note in English:
“System Message:
* Your password is sent to registered e-mail!”
After that I was able to login - so worked fine with me…
Try checking your email…
Ann Smarty on Mar 10, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Btw, you can also try their demo account for a start:
http://serparchive.org/?account=demo
Ashish Mohta on Mar 10, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Поле “Пароль” может содержать только латинские символы без пробелов и знаков препинания!
This is what I got and I then thought of trying google transaltion which says
The “Password” may contain only Latin characters with no spaces or punctuation!
I finally registered but the error message was again in russian. Thanks for replying back else I would not have tried it anyway
spostareduro on Mar 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm
You’ve got me curious about this tool now Annie..Thanks for the hook-up.
Nick on Mar 10, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Sounds like a useful tool. I’ll give it a go. Thanks for sharing.
Calamier on Mar 10, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Great tip ann! Thanks for the serp archive tool…
Ann Smarty on Mar 11, 2008 at 4:07 am
@Kim @Nick @Calamier I hope it will be helpful - please post your feedback here.
Brian Turner on Mar 11, 2008 at 10:37 am
The service looks interesting, but it’s too generic - here in the UK we need to be able to check Google.co.uk results - Google.com results are only useful for those in the US.
If they could add something to allow geotargeted search, the service would definitely have a lot more potential in the wider global market.
2c.
Wolfgang on Mar 11, 2008 at 11:21 am
the service can only use google.com als search basis. google.de for example.
Ann Smarty on Mar 11, 2008 at 11:34 am
@Brian Turner: 100% agree; geo search is something they do need to add… The tool is rather new so I guess it will approve over time and (maybe) monetized…
@Wolfgang: only Google.com
Brian Turner on Mar 11, 2008 at 1:42 pm
What I’d be absolutely happy to pay for is a version I can host myself on my own servers, with my own private client login.
But would need to be able to pick google.co.uk results to really make it worthwhile - at present, anyone looking to check rankings on google.com already has the digitalpoint tool available to them, though attempts to use the UK results there have been less than accurate.
2c.
Adam Snider on Mar 11, 2008 at 6:21 pm
That’s a great looking tool, Ann, thanks for pointing it out. Looks like it might be better than some of the ones I’ve tried in the past.
Ann Smarty on Mar 12, 2008 at 2:14 am
@Brian: I would rather pay for developing a custom in-house tool (I tend to find flaws with tools developed by someone else);
@Adam: thanks for stopping by!
Neyne on Mar 12, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Have been using this for a while and mentioned it in my last post. It can be used for many things (think link: queries for your competitors). One thing that should be kept in mind - their location report seem to be based on 100 results per page setup - even if you chose to present it as 10 results per page. Keep that in mind since the locations may change depending on the number of results displayed.
Ann Smarty on Mar 13, 2008 at 9:53 am
@Neyne: it never occured to me to use that to monitor link: queries… Thank you! While I don’t use Google for checking backlinks (because it doesnt show all links it actually sees/counts), monitoring their domain name mentions could be a great idea!
Greg on Mar 22, 2008 at 3:42 am
This is a great tool and i will share it with my DB of partners as well that are not so technically minded -this makes it really easy to monitor who to watch out for and what to watch out for - thanks for this and the many other great articles .
Tristan on Mar 22, 2008 at 7:40 am
Thanks for the tip, worthwhile as a free service.
Mihir Lakhani on Mar 27, 2008 at 4:35 am
thank you for such a helpful article
will try given ideas to improve my websites search performance
but its funny … google included 70 pages on 2nd day of submission and dropped all in a day ?
is tht usual ?
hope to see them back in google.
straightalk on Mar 27, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Tell it like it is sister.. loved it and will promote it on my spots..
Cheers mate
Christoph C. Cemper the MarketingFan on Mar 31, 2008 at 6:56 am
SerpArchive is an awesome tool I’ve been using for almost a year now… too bad it now got more publicity, now they’ll have to start to charge for it - probably… :-)
James on Apr 5, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Great article - thanks. I couldnt agree more with the need to constantly monitor search engine rankings.
I use http://www.rankangel.com - it allows me to setup projects that retest the keyword/url/search engine combinations and graph the results. It also works with exact and similar matches for ad-hoc tests, which is nice.
Emule on Apr 25, 2008 at 3:46 am
:0(
Service temporarily unavailable!
Sorry, due a technical reasons service temporarily unavailable until approximately April 15.
We are working hard to restore a service.
For request more info feel free to contact us via e-mail.
Sincerely yours, Serp Archive Team.
Ann Smarty on Apr 25, 2008 at 4:17 am
Yes, sorry to say that, but the service is down for now. Still, I am sure it will be up and running in the nearest future…
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