The other day I did a post/video identifying what is link velocity, and in that post I discussed how you should avoid using methods which create unnatural or suspect link velocity. The reason is that this can ultimately hurt your rankings, particularly if these links are of low quality or over optimized.
In the world of search engine optimization, it can be very disheartening to put so much time into creating good content, putting it out there for other webmasters to find, creating high quality links to your site, and basically just promoting it in every way which you can think of (see my 70 ways to increase website traffic) and ultimately not seeing your site climb in the rankings.
Generally the only thing missing from this equation is time as, barring a truly high quality and worthwhile link, it generally takes a few weeks to a few months before you will see yourself breaking into the top 10 if you’re doing your job more or less. Conversely, when you DO break into the top 10 and gun for that top spot it’s one of the greatest feelings known to SEOers.
In the past I’ve talked about how to check Google rankings. A different way to recognize the fruits of your labor on a more generalized and complete level is to use your Google Webmaster Tools account.
As I demonstrate in the video above, select the website profile you want to check up on, select “traffic”, then “search queries”.
Here you’ll get a sortable list of all of the keywords people use to find your site. It compares impressions vs. clicks, or in other words the number of times your site appears in the SERPs when someone searches for the corresponding keyword vs. the number of times they actually click through to your site.
You’ll also find your average ranking per keyword, something you can’t find out in Google Analytics. It gives you the position which your site/page is appearing at in Google for hundreds of keywords if you’re ranking for them, up to position 1,000.
The great thing about this is you can get a major overview of your top 10 rankings for hundreds of keywords all at once so you can prioritize which ones you want to target. I talk more about this and how you can do it on a smaller scale in this video on how to find low hanging keywords, but using Google Webmaster Tools you can sort them by your highest ranking to lowest so you can see which keywords you don’t have the top spot for but are close with.
Once you have this information you can download the data into a CSV and upload your keywords to your keyword tool of choice to further investigate and prioritize accordingly, though admittedly the inclusion of impressions as a stat in Google Webmaster tools means you have a pretty realistic idea of the search volume you’re getting from each keyword so long as you’re appearing in the top 10.