Kayaking.org Update: Using Google Webmaster Tools and SEOMoz to Track My Progress
As you probably know I’ve been pretty busy turning Kayaking.org into one of the top Kayaking sites on the Internet. I’m not there yet…in fact I have a long ways to go – but I thought now would be a great time to show you the tools I use to gauge progress. You can’t really say you’re doing better if you have nothing to compare it to – right?
First, it’s important that you’re convinced of the potential. Never go through the trouble of building an entire brand in a tiny market. You can easily find-out how much potential your market has by searching on Google and seeing who the key players are in the space. In my case, the Kayaking niche is dominated by Paddling.net – a site dedicated to canoeing and kayaking. So how much traffic does the top site in this niche get? Remember, this is the site I want to beat – I want to get the same amount or more traffic than them!
Now back to tracking your progress. So I’m convinced that there is a meaningful market for Kayaking.org online. Next I need to understand how I rank in Google. I can’t tell you how many Domainers still spend time typing their keywords into Google and using that as their ranking metric. This doesn’t work any more! It hasn’t worked ever since Google introduced Personalized Search which is enabled for pretty much everyone using Google. This means what you see is not what someone else sees when they type in the same keywords.
With Google Instant Search now the top keywords are displayed directly in the search bar making it even more difficult to really know where you sit in Google…unless of course you use Google Webmaster Tools which actually shows you – and it’s free, and it’s from Google themselves! Below is some of the useful ranking information it can provide for Kayaking.org:
I can easily track how my ranking improves by using this tool and monitoring important keywords over time. However rank is only one side of the equation, I’m also concerned about how many links I have coming to my site. The more links from high PR relevant sites the better I will rank, and the more traffic I will get both organically and from the referrer. I use SEOMoz’s Linkscape tool to get this information:
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