In the film ‘Field of Dreams’ Kevin Costner built a baseball field in his crops, upset his wife, became a laughing stock in the local community and nearly went bankrupt. But the advice was true, he built it and they came. If only the same was true of the web.
For years people have been under the illusion that if you simply build a website you’ll be inundated with customers and become an overnight success, but it takes more than just building a site for it to become a business. Imagine you were opening a business on your local high street but had over 100 million other local business’ to compete with and over 1.5 billion potential customers. You’d have to do some pretty serious marketing to let people know your shop existed, but this is what you’re up against on the web. So how do you find what you’re looking for? You use a search engine, right? But making your site visible in the search engine rankings for what you want to be found for isn’t as easy as you might imagine. Welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimisation.
At B&M we spend a lot of time trying to make our clients sites as visible as possible to search engines. From the design of the site all the way through the way we build it to the images and text used, we are looking to improve the search engine rankings. Measuring the success of these techniques hasn’t always been that easy though, which is why we have just finished a trial using Advanced Web Ranking, a website ranking software.
After 30 days of usage, we have to say we’re impressed. The information takes a long time to gather (we usually leave it running overnight) but the data available is detailed, easy to understand and gives us genuinely usable information to either react to or pass on to our clients. While we monitor the amount of traffic visiting our clients sites though Analytical software as well as getting feedback from our clients on how their websites are performing, this lets us collate tangible information that goes hand in hand with this information.
So how does it work?
You feed in the searches you want to be found for and the search engines to query. AWR then checks each website, leaving just enough time between each search to stop the search engine from thinking this is an automated search and blocking your IP address. You can then see where your website is positioned, the improvement/deterioration in the sites position as well as an analysis of the keywords on your site.
A series of reports can be generated which show this information over a particular time period, which is especially useful for us when building a new site for a client as we can perform a before/after report once the new site has been deployed. Likewise, it gives us the scope to measure the success of changes or updates over a period of time. All of this information can then be cross referenced against a particular search and a particular search engine, allowing you to focus on very detailed pieces of information.
Another particularly useful tool is the ability to see the top sites for any of your searches in a particular search engine. Invariably these are your main competitors so being able to measure your sites positioning against them is invaluable. More often than not once you have secured good search engine positioning, it becomes a case of maintaining that position as your competitors react or update their sites. By being able to monitor the shifting position of your site in direct comparison to your competitors you can react to these changes, helping maintain a great position in the search engine rankings.
Finally, and probably the best part of all is that this is Mac software! It’s no secret that B&M aren’t exactly fans of anything Microsoft so the ability to use this on the vastly superior Apple platform comes as great news!
We are continually looking for ways to better serve our clients and the best possible software has long been part of this. We always strive to offer the best value for money too so anything that can add value to our service is always welcome. Advanced Web Ranking has just become another way for us to do this. Fingers crossed we won’t be building a baseball field outside the office any time soon though…
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