If you are in business today, conducting transactions online via your website, you need to know where you rank for your keywords. Finding out this information is not as straight forward as you might think. If you only have one website then you might manage with manual searches, or use one of the rank providing sites available online.
by GeorgePearsonShearsmith


If you are in business today, conducting transactions online via your website, you need to know where you rank for your keywords. Finding out this information is not as straight forward as you might think. If you only have one website then you might manage with manual searches, or use one of the rank providing sites available online.

There are a few issues with these sites. They seem to take their results from a different hub than the search engine is working off at the time and so never gives truly accurate results. Also, the regions (i.e. Google.co.uk or Google.com) tend to be limited to worldwide, and so you will rarely be able find your rankings in a specific country.

The problem is worsened by Googles limits on the amount of searches that you can make in an hour. The limit is currently 200 in an hour. This is the same as searching four keywords and looking through the rankings up to rank 500. This will become a big problem if you have several websites with several keywords each.

The solution to this problem is a partially automated piece of software that will run searches on your desired Google engine, stay within their search limits and give you accurate information every time you run it. You will also want it to give you information on your current number of backlinks, the traffic that comes from your individual keywords, information on your competitor sites etc.

Most ranking software will not offer you all of that information, let alone the option to white label it in order to sell it on as your own product. Finding good reliable software is difficult but not impossible. If you are an SEO company, you will be judged by your results, and your reports form an important part of that process. Your clients need to be able to see usable data that will reassure them that you are working hard on their behalf.

As your clients will not understand your business as well and as intricately as you do, a monthly report showing them how their rankings are improving month in month out, as well as the link building progress that is backing up the rank improvements. Your clients are unlikely to understand the intricate workings of seo or theyd do it themselves, but some key performance indicators will allow them to see what youre working on and will allow your relationship with your clients to grow.

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