Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Search engines and your "visibility strategy"
If you care about people finding you on the internet, you care about search engines. And you already know how tricky it can be to gain and retain valuable high placement in their results pages. Some search engine marketing firms sell services by promising high rankings, but many dispute the value or even the legitimacy of some such services.
External Design just focuses on what works. If high rankings are important to your business — especially for search terms and phrases for which there are many competing web sites — you need a visibility strategy. And you need to track it over time in order to make informed course corrections amid the changing internet landscape.
How can you know what works?
Search-engine rankings fluctuate, that's their nature. Say you need consistent high rankings for several competitive keywords. Tracking the results of your search engine optimizations will help you to evaluate and improve your visibility strategy. Having hard data and unbiased reporting will be invaluable to you.
"We believe objective, quantifiable data is critical to gauging the effectiveness-over-time of your visibility strategy. At first it may feel like tough love but, in the end, everyone wins."
Visibility Statistics |
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First Place Rankings: |
Top 5: |
Top 10: |
Top 20: |
Top 30: |
Moved Up: |
Moved Down: |
Same: |
Total: |
net: |
Keywords: 24 |
Engines: 11 |
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This actual client summary is an overview from many pages of reports that help to verify the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns.
External Design can produce detailed reports and graphs to be viewed in your web browser. We can host the files in a private directory or upload them to your server. They will show your current rankings, the site's trends over time, competing web sites and more — all for multiple keywords and phrases, on multiple web pages, as ranked by multiple search engines. A set of reports can be generated as frequently as you like, and a regular schedule usually is best.
Audit the results of your search engine optimizations
Detailed rankings reports like these can help guide your in-house visibility strategists or the work of outside optimization consultants. The reports can include:
- results from multiple search engines
- rankings for each of multiple web pages
- rankings for multiple keywords & keyword phrases
- trend reports of rankings-change over time, by keyword and page
- search engine submissions included, if requested
- optionally, suggestions for code and content optimization
It's painless to have accurate, third-party reports that measure how changes to your site, changes to other sites and ambient, net-wide factors affect your site's search-engine prominence.
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search engine reporting
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