Monitoring where pages appear in search engine results for search terms and keywords isn’t easy. Due to the complexity of search engines and their ever changing algorithms, each individual can get different results, and even they may not be the same from one day to the next.

Despite that, there are things you can do. One that I’d like to draw your attention to is the Top Search Queries in Google webmasters tools. You’ll need a Google webmasters account and to verify your site, but then your up and running (for free).

You can find the “Top Search Queries” report under the statistics section. If you’ve used it before it’s worth revisiting because in the last month or so Google have added a history feature so you can now track keyword performance over time.

On the whole the top search report is fairly self-explanatory but it’s worth noting the links at the bottom. The link titled “Download all query stats for this site (including sub folders)” lists all pages on your site that are indexed and the top 20 key phrases that return each page as part of the results set. You need to take the listing positions with a grain of salt as they are only the top placement over the past 7 days – which may not be where you regularly appear. But at least they show you where you appear.

The format of the csv file (QuerySiteStatsGlobal_YYYYMMDD……..csv) isn’t always the easiest to deal with and often takes a bit of manipulation before you can do anything useful with it (unless your just manually looking at things). I normally go through a few simple steps to get it into something much more useful:

  1. Strip out all the Google locations (domains) I’m not interested in, including the “all locations” option. Auto Filters are really good for this if you haven’t used them before.
  2. Strip out all the Search Types I’m not interested in. Depending on the nature of your site you may or may not be interested in image searches and mobile devices.
  3. Separate out the search terms so there is one per URL. You can do this relatively easily with some substitution trickery in excel and a dash of find and replace magic in word. Hopefully you end up with one result per line that you can then date and then track over time in your preferred database of spreadsheet tool. If you would like more details on the data manipulation part leave a comment below and add some more details.

This isn’t the only option available, however its one of the easiest, and depending on the maturity of your site, may well be sufficient to get you up and running until you need a more comprehensive solution. So if you haven’t already, download the query site stats global and see how you get on.

Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 5:53 pm | Categories: seo, monitoring, data driven decisions

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