The other day I overheard a person talking with their paid “web expert” about their ranking in the search engines (SEs). The “web expert” was explaining how well he had done his job by noting that the client ranked #1 on Google when they typed his company name into a Google search.
Well, glory be… ranking #1 for one’s own name. That must have required a ton of work and some long, hard hours at the keyboard for the “expert…” NOT!
I’ve seen the same kind of claims made for searched conducted using the website’s URL. WOW! A #1 ranking. Here’s the kind of results you should get using a domain-based search.
I have had potential clients some to me who didn’t rank at all for their own company name. That’s a problem. Usually this occurs when a business doesn’t have a website and hasn’t been indexed online by a directory or other service. Fortunately, it is becoming a rare occurrence.
What you really want to know is how well you rank for a keyword that your current or potential customers will type into Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
For instance, my business specializes in web marketing and is based in Danville, KY. When I typed “web marketing Danville KY” into Google on one day, the following was the result on the Search Engines Results Page (SERP):
As you can see, OrangeCat.com captured the first four results for the keyword AND there is a more results link that gives several more. In addition, my website at KentuckyWebExperts.com ranked number five for an article that’s only been up for a week and after a domain name change to the site two weeks ago.
That’s the kind of result I like to see.
And it’s the kind of result you can get for your keywords if you use WordPress, add the proper plugins and post content that the SEs can easily index and categorize.
Word of caution: If you keep typing the same keyword into a search and then click on the same page over and over, you will notice it rising in the rankings. But only for you.
To get a true picture of how you rank for certain keywords, you need to use a tool like the SE Rank Checker and know how to interpret the results.
As you can see here, when we used the SE Rank Checker, the results for Google were almost identical to our web search except that my second site picked up another listing, giving me 6 of 10 page one results.
Looking up your own rankings by doing a web search will give you a good idea of how you rank, but to achieve the best results, use a SE Rank Checker search as your base results and compare the results of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work in the future to determine how you are improving and how fast.
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