Rankings, Competitors and Analytics in One !!

Search Engine rankings may not be as meaningful as they once were, however they still do hold some value, and if they are combined with things like competitive data and web analytics, search engine rankings can be quite useful. We have had our share of demos of search engine ranking software over the years, but the latest one from SEO Rank Monitor deserves a second look.

Before we get into the details, there is a full 30 day trial available, which allows you test drive 10 domains and 2500 keywords - Data is collected daily.

The setup is quite standard, like most ranking tools, you add your domains and keywords (with their appropriate groupings) and select your search engines (in this case 30 to choose from). Next you add your competitor's domains, which is not revolutionary, but very useful nonetheless.

Finally, you have the option of connecting your Google Analytics account so you can tie together rankings and visits. This will help you decipher whether a rank 5 for one keyword provides more visits vs. a rank 8 for a separate keyword.


The way the dashboard is setup is quite unique. It provides a week by week comparison allowing you to see rankings at a very high level, for example: Total keywords ranked in positions 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 one week vs. another week.

Source: Rankings, Competitors and Analytics in One

Thoughts on Google Instant !!

Google’s web search (and web search infrastructure) team tries to do several things well:
- We want the most comprehensive index of the web. We explore ways to crawl the web deeper, faster, and better, from increasing our index size or indexing speed to crawling web forms to discovering links in JavaScript.
- We try to return relevant, useful results. Hundreds of people work on lots of improvements to our ranking algorithms.
- We try to return your search results really fast.
- We try to improve our search user interface (UI).

The first three things aren’t highly visible. Average users might not notice changes like Caffeine (improved indexing) or a better algorithm to detect hacked sites–although we have seen effects like users searching more when we deploy a fresher index. A bunch of people at Google have come up with amazing ways to make your search results faster. We’ve shared many of those insights to help make the web faster as a whole.

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. :) With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Source: Thoughts on Google Instant