Relevance

Relevance is in many ways a judgment call. How would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site? Would your site answer their question or resolve their need? Does a good landing page for this term currently exist on your site, or could one be built? We are going to ask you to classify relevance on a scale from Very Poor to Excellent. Your relevance values should also incorporate the following perspectives: Your Writers/Editors Ask yourself if the people who write content on your website will be comfortable using this term to describe your products and services. Better yet, go ask them the question.

Other Sites That Come Up in the Search

Try entering the term into a search engine and see what other sites come up. Are the top-ranking websites from organizations that are similar to yours? Surprisingly, in SEO you often do want to be situated in the vicinity of your competitors. If a searcher enters a keyword and sees a page full of weird, seemingly unrelated results, they are likely to try again with a different search. Value of the Conversion Your relevance level should also take into account the value of the conversion for a term.

For example, if the two terms “ginger syrup” and “crystallized ginger” are equally well matched to your site, but you believe that people searching for “crystallized ginger” are going to be more valuable conversions (because it's a much more expensive delicacy!), then that keyword should get a boost. It's guesswork and intuition at this point, but after a few months, you'll have some tracking under your belt and a much clearer understanding of the conversion values for different terms. Here's a detailed examination of a few of Jason's keywords.

These examples should give you some guidance for thinking about your own keywords: Keyword: infants, Relevance Rating: Poor Think about all the different things that someone might be looking for when entering the word “infants” into the search engine, ranging from gifts to medical advice.

Yes, it's true that Babyfuzzkin's products do fall within this range, but so do millions of other sites. Here's a tip you can count on: Pearl of Wisdom: It's very rare that a one-word term is going to pass the relevance test unless it's your business name!

Sizing Up the Competition

The Left Brain and Right Brain look at different perspectives on estimating competition levels for keywords on your long list: The Right Brain says, “You know your business, so you know what aspects of your business have more, or stronger, competitors. If you work for a bank, you don't need the numbers to tell you that the term ‘low mortgage rates' is going to be very competitive. But for terms that are less obvious, you can do a competition gut check by searching for that term and looking for the following indicators:

- “Do most of the sites in the top several pages of results appear to have the same conversion goals as you? Do you recognize some of your known competitors in there? Did you just find new competitors that you hadn't known about before? If you've got the same goals as the top-ranking sites, you're in a competitive space.

- “Are most of the sites in the top several pages of results trying to sell something related to the keyword you're assessing? Even SEO newbies can see that the vast majority of sites that show up for ‘low mortgage rates' are trying to sell mortgages. But search for ‘low literacy rates', and you can really see the difference there's much less of a feeling that the site owners are jumping up and down, shouting,‘Over here!'

- “How many sponsored listings do you see for the term in question? Sites that are selling something are likely to spend more time and money optimizing, so terms with a lot of commercial results are likely to be more competitive.”

The Left Brain says, “Industry insight is important, but quantitative values give you more solid ground to stand on. Anyone estimating competition levels for a keyword should research these numbers:

- “How many pages on the Web are already optimized for the term? To estimate this value, you can perform a specialized search on Google and find out how many sites have that keyword in their HTML page title tag. Just type allintitle: “keyword” into the search box (don't forget the quotes). For example, Jason would type allintitle: “baby clothes” to find out how many websites are using that term in their HTML title. (See our companion website at www .yourseoplan.com for other useful search tricks.)

- “As we showed you earlier, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives you an indication of the level of paid competition for a given keyword. However, if you have a Google AdWords account, you can go to the next level and review the top bid prices.This applies to other paid search services as well, not just Google. If you don't have a paid search account,we'll explain how to set up accounts and check these values in Part III.”

Ranks

No matter how often we tell you not to obsess about ranks, we know you better than that. So if you're the one who spends your nights with visions of Googleplums dancing in your head, today is the day we'll let you give in to your passion! Of course, conversions are more important than ranks, and your fundamental business goals are more important than search engine traffic. But great search engine ranks really do speak volumes, and checking your ranks can be an enlightening experience.

Rank Assessment in a Nutshell

To start your assessment, open the Rank Tracking Worksheet that you downloaded from yourseoplan.com. On this worksheet, you'll see spaces for each of your top 10 keywords. (Adjust the number if you wish, but don't increase it much beyond 10 if you want to keep this task manageable!) Here's how you'll do it:

- Moving one by one through your short list, search for your top keywords on Google. (To save time, you can set your search engines to display 30 results per page using the Preferences screen.)

- Scroll through the top 30 ranks. If any page on your website shows up within these results, note the rank in the Rank Tracking Worksheet. If you don't see your site in the ranks, mark “none.”

- We're recording ranks for organic Web results only! Local listings, videos, and images count. Sponsored Listings should not be tracked as part of your standard rank check.

- Repeat with MSN and Yahoo!.

Automated vs.Manual Rank Checking

There's no way around the fact that reviewing all those results on all those search engines for all those keywords can be a bit of a snoozer.

Some SEO professionals have dropped rank checking out of the equation altogether because it is less connected to your business goals than other metrics such as conversion tracking. Of SEOs that still perform rank checking, some use automated rank-checking software. Available programs include Advanced Web Ranking, Web- Position, and Digital Point Solutions.

But even with all of the available tools, we still perform manual rank checking for our clients, and we insist on it for you, too. Here's why:

- Manual rank checking is more accurate than automated checking. In the everchanging search engine-results landscape, it often takes a human to determine whether your listings are surrounded by directory sites, partner sites, or even sponsored listings.

- Manual rank checking keeps you in close touch with the goings-on in the search engine ranks for your target keywords. We want you to drink in the details. Keep an eagle eye out for your competition and any interesting or unusual results. Who is ranking well, and are they doing well on more than one engine? Have you spotted any possible cheaters? Did an unexpected page of your site (or a PDF or DOC file) show up? These are the kinds of things you can find if you take the time to look.

- Most search engines, including Google, frown upon automated rank-checking programs because they perform multiple queries that can create a burden on the search engine. Many of these tools actually violate the engines' terms of service. If you absolutely must use an automated system (for example, your organization has a need to track a large number of keywords on a monthly basis), do everything you can to reduce the burden on the search engines. Most rank-checking tools offer a “be nice to search engines” mode, which will slow down your rank checks; be sure to use it. And you don't need to run a rank check every night go with weekly or monthly. Your automated tool, used sparingly and set to reduce the search engine's load, can at best be considered almost legal. Your site won't be penalized for automated rank-checking activity, but there is a chance that Google will get peeved and cut off your organization's use of the search engine.

The Scenic Route

As we touched upon earlier, your manual rank-checking task has fringe benefits: It provides a great opportunity to watch out for “uglies”: bad snippets, broken links, or any other interesting, mysterious, or undesirable results your website is showing in the search engines. Be sure to make a detailed note (or even a screen shot) of anything out of the ordinary (use the Notes column in your Rank Tracking Worksheet, or enter it in your Task Journal) so that you can return to it later.