One of the biggest questions in internet marketing is “what keywords do I rank for”? It seems simple, but the reality is, there are not many tools out there that will give you exactly what you are looking for.
In just a minute, I am going to share with you how we check our keyword rankings, and how we find out if there are keyword phrases that people are searching for that we should be targeting better by optimizing them on our pages.
But First, Let’s Talk About Keywords
If you set up a website for your company or business, you publish it to the web, and then you sit back and wait to see how many visitors come, you are only hurting yourself. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot. You are doing all the work of setting the site up, writing the content, and getting backlinks (at least I hope you are), yet you are not reaping any of the rewards by not doing your due diligence with the research.
How Do I Properly Do Keyword Research?
Most people in our world, the IM world, think that keyword research is only done before you write content and publish it to the web.
This is probably one of the biggest mistakes made by online marketers.
Why?
Keyword research is one of the most important concepts of internet marketing, as it ties directly in to search engine optimization.
There are tons of tools out there to show you what visitors have come to your site, and what phrase they used to find you. But what about the keywords that you don’t even know you are ranking for. These are the keywords where maybe your site is ranking on page 6 or 7 of Google, and if you don’t know it, you will do nothing about it, and your site will continue to sit on every page but 1.
If you can find these keywords, you can optimize the page that is getting them ranked, and push your site up the search results for the particular phrase.
Google analytics, and some of the other free traffic tools are awesome, and I highly recommend that you keep a close eye on your traffic, but the road doesn’t end there.
So What Tool Will Tell Me What Keywords I Rank For?
Ah, the moment you’ve been waiting for. I’ll tell you what, until I found this keyword tool, I too was wandering aimlessly in cyber-space trying to figure out what long-tail keywords (or sometimes not so long-tail) I should be targeting on my web pages.
And then I found Serped.Net. Now, unfortunately, this program is not always open to new members, but I highly suggest getting on their mailing list to be notified when it launches again. But keep reading…
Once you add your website into the tool, you can select how many searches you want it to display. For example, if you want to see the top 20 keywords your site is ranking for, select 20, or you can go up to 100 if it’s needed.
Serped is a whole onslaught of internet marketing tools all under one roof. You can do research for local client consulting, or research the competitors in your niche.
How About Domain Research Too?
Yep, you can do that as well. Find the top expired domains, or domains ready to expire. Find out what links they have pointing to their site so that you know if it’s worth placing a bid for, or if it’s just spam.
Oh, and did I mention that you can do your initial keyword research right from the Serped interface?
There are so many features, that I could not hardly list them all here, but I will tell you that if you are in local client consulting, you definitely need to get this software. A new feature that was just added is a Site Audit Tool.
Ok, So If It’s Not Available Right Now, Then What?
I would recommend MicroSite Masters. With this program, you enter the keywords that you are trying to rank for, but you can also use a free keyword research tool like Google Planner to scrape long-tail keywords for your niche, and enter them in. Once your site ranks for any of the long-tails, MicroSite Masters will show you where your site is ranking so you can work on optimizing each keyword.
This also has other features aside from keyword tracking, so I would suggest at the very least that you take a look at their sales page, and keep in mind there is a free option as well.
I hope you found this article about how to check keyword ranking helpful.
Here’s to happy rankings, and gaining a higher position in the search engines for the long-tail keywords that you may never thought to have optimized for.
