Search engines are often the first place people go online when they are looking for goods or services, so where your website appears in the results matters. If your URL is buried far down the list, the chances that a potential customer will never find you increase. Once you earn a strong search engine position, it is essential to protect the ranking
you have worked so hard to achieve.
That means you need a strategy for monitoring your search engine positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you leave your stock portfolio to chance and market fluctuations, or would you watch it closely so you could buy and sell at the right time? You should approach your search engine positions the same way.
At first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and taken the right steps to improve your rankings, you will likely see a steady climb. The point to watch for is when that climb begins to level off. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two: monitoring and protection.
In stage two, do not worry too much about short-term fluctuations in your positions. These changes are like the small rises and falls in a stock portfolio. Short-term movement is a normal part of the process. It is the long-term changes you need to watch closely and be ready to act on quickly.
Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way search engines rank websites can change at the drop of a hat. If you are unaware of these changes, many of which are subtle but can seriously affect your ranking, your position may fall to the bottom of the list before you realize what happened. To help prevent this kind of sharp drop, create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to track your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely.
Each search engine uses a formula to calculate website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, your ranking may rise or fall. Some search engines use several different formulas, rotating them so that one formula does not become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly move up or down significantly. For this reason, you need to check your positions frequently so you can identify when a search engine changes
formulas and understand how that change affects your rankings.
You must also pay close attention to your competition, which is a crucial factor. A competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically pushing your position lower. Or their position may drop, allowing your position to move higher. Each month, expect position changes caused by continual shifts in your competitors’ rankings, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy
to compensate for any decreases. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website and strengthen your position in search results.
Of course, your monitoring efforts will only be effective if you know which search engines are the most popular. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge is that these top ten may change from month to month.
This means you must not only monitor your search engine positions, but also track the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently each month, and be sure to live in the present. People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news a few months later. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of Internet users.
Another factor to watch carefully is a sudden drop in your positions across all search engines. This is not the same as normal monthly fluctuations. It is a neon red warning sign. It could mean a number of different things.
If all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engine spiders, those programs that seek out your site and rank its pages, have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become confused and drop your positions dramatically. If a spider visits your website while it is down for adjustments or changes, you may disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, causing your website to appear irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing your positions to drop across all search engines.
Some search engines rely on results from other search engines, so it is vital to know which engines these are and to track all the engines they influence. The biggest problem is that search engines sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but also keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.
Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they deserve individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you find that several of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase may have recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.
Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. It costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor them regularly. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture: your long-term marketing campaign.
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