Two tools for tracking search keyword placement

I've been working over the past few months on better search-engine results for several key phrases related to KidPub. There are two tools that I'm using to help track them:

• SheerSEO
• SEOBook Rank Checker

SheerSEO
This site monitors weekly changes in placement of search results on Google and Yahoo. It's currently free to sign up. You can track a large number of search phrases, and the results are shown in an easy to understand table. You can also export the results to a Excel file. Here's a snip of a recent report:




You can see that 'kids stories' is moving up nicely, from 37th spot to 24th. You can also see that 'publish my story' doesn't point to KidPub's home page, which I need to fix.

SheerSEO's service runs once per week and sends an email to you when new results are ready. You can add or remove search terms at any time.

You can see a position chart for each phrase on either Yahoo or Google:



I think that this is really useful information, and it saves me the trouble of having to track and chart a spreadsheet full of keywords. I can measure the effect of changes I make on KidPub, both positive and negative, and know when I can stop tweaking.

SEOBook Rank Checker
For spot checks I like to use SEOBook's Rank Checker, which is an add-on for Firefox. You can grab it from the SEOBook site. Even though it does offer historical information, I tend to use it when I want to know how a particular keyword is standing on Google or Yahoo (it also does Live Search). There's a scheduling option that will run the checker periodically for you in the background.

The results are typically identical to SheerSEO's.

Both tools give you a great bit of intel on how your SEO work is progressing, and you can quickly see if something has either gone wrong (fix it!) or is working well (duplicate it!). This level of detail might seem overwhelming, but remember, half to three-quarters of your site's traffic is probably coming from Google and Yahoo, so it make sense to pay attention to search reult positioning!

Closing in on 100K!

Back in August, KidPub was ranked around 400,000 by both Compete and Quantcast. We targeted the 100,000 mark back in November when we started doing serious work on building traffic, mainly through SEO and grass-roots marketing. I just looked at today's Quantcast number...119,146. Last week was 127K or so. We're getting closer!

Once we hit the 100K mark the hard work begins...gettting KidPub into the top 50K web sites. I know there are ways to 'spoof' Alexa to get a high ranking, but Quantcast numbers don't lie, since they are directly measured.

We're not getting many conversions yet from the Facebook ads, but the exposure is helping a bit, I think. It's only been three or four days since the FB campaigns started...it needs more time before I can really analyze the results. We're still watching click-through rates on several ads to figure out which are the best performers.

Free (Ad) Lunch on FaceBook

I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out that Facebook is a seething pool of KidPub's target audience. The site is aimed toward kid ages 8 to 15, and there certainly are a few of them on FaceBook. A blog post over at StartupNation prompted me to take a look at advertising opportunities on FaceBook.

Ads on FB are similar to Google Adwords. They are small, textual (though you can add an image) and appear in an ad bar at the right-hand side of the page. If you run Adwords campaings you can likely run the same ads on FB.

What is great about FB advertising is that they offer you the option of targeting a specific audience, and provide a rough estimate of how many users are in the particular set:


My target audience is kids 15 and under, and FB estimates about 2,000,000 users in that range.

Like Adwords, you can set daily spend limits, set the bid for either CPM or CTC ad types, and track progress. The first ad I placed has run for about 12 hours with 142,000 impressions and 64 clicks. Not a great ratio, but my cost-per-click is lower that on the Google ad network, and I hope that I'm reaching a higher concentration of my target audience. I'll post about conversion rates when I have some data.

Ah, the free lunch part. The StartupNation blog pointed out the value of advertising on FaceBook. I started doing a bit of resarch, and kept running acroos bloggers saying, "For goodness sake, don't spend YOUR money on ads...use coupons!"

Sure enough, a bit of Googling turned up lists of coupon codes to redeem at FaceBook for advertising. I spent about half an hour hunting and submitting, and ended up with $350 credit in my ad account. Coupns are used before your primary source of funding (a credit or debit account), so for a week or so I can play with ad styles, formats, and copy and see what works well, using FaceBook's money.

Quantcast Demographcs Improving Over Time

Not a huge surprise, but I've noticed that the demographics reported by Quantcast for KidPub have improved quite a bit. It makes sense; prior to adding their tracking code to my site they were making their best guess...now they can more closely correlate their data.

The biggest change is in the gender numbers. Based on my own look at registration data, KidPub has about a 60-40 girl-boy ratio. Before adding Quantcast tracking code they reported the opposite, or about a 58-42 boy-girl split. They now show the split to be 58-42 girl-boy, which matches my own numbers.

It helps build my confidence in Quantcast's numbers. Alexa and Compete don't provide this level of detail. And I'm starting to wonder about Alexa. The rank numbers given by Quantcast and Compete are nearly identical (Quantcast: 173,693, Compete: 172, 223), while Alexa is way off in the weeds. I've read that Alexa is relatively useless for site not ranked in the top 100,000, and I'm starting to believe it.

Name recognition: HARO

Peter Shankman runs a great service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Two to three times on weekdays, he sends out a list of queries from reporters who are working on stories and looking for experts to interview or quote. As Peter points out, everyone is an expert at something!

HARO is a great way to build recognition and trust for your business and yourself as a brand. I experienced this while working as a market analyst for a firm in Boston. After one or two solid conversations with a member of the press, word got around that I knew something about enterprise IT infrastructure, and I started receiving regular calls when a journalist had a question.

HARO queries are all over the place topic-wise, so there's bound to be something that you know something about. By providing insightful commentary you'll start to build a reputation as a go-to person when journalists are writing, and the exposure for you and your comapny can be priceless.

Alexa versus Quantcast versus Compete

"You can't manage what you don't measure" has been an adage as long as there's been management. It's also human nature to rank, compare, and contrast...I'm sure that the buzz around the water cooler in Egypt was, "So, are these the tallest pyramids, or have the Aztecs taken first again?"

I'm a big fan of Google Analytics and spend time every day looking for new ways to cut the data. There are insights in GA data that you just can't get anywhere else short of hiring a propeller-head to build some industrial-strength custom code for your site. The one thing that GA lacks, though, is competitive data, and for that I turn to sites like Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and I use all of them for slightly different purposes. All three try to measure traffic and demographics on web sites and display them in a way that lets you measure performance.

Compete.com is the vaguest of the three in terms of where they get their data. According to their site, they use a "unique methodology" that relies on work done by "experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences." I have to admit, it reminds me of the end of Raider of the Lost Ark. They apparently have "Top. People." working on this. Kidding aside, Compete lets you compare five sites in terms of visitors, time spent on the site, and a few other parameters. I use it for a quick look at how KidPub is stacking up against my competitors. Data are presented in monthly chunks.

Here's how KidPub and Stone Soup compare at Compete.com:



Alexa relies on user participation to generate the bulk of its data. Web surfers must install the Alexa toolbar into their browser, which send daa back to Alexa for crunching. The advantage of this is a good degree of granularity...Alexa can say with a fair amount of confidence how long a user stayed on a site, how many pages the viewed, and so on. The huge drawback is that the data sample is self-selecting...people who a) know about the Alexa toolbar (maybe because I put a link to it on my site) and b) are willing to install it. I won't install it, and most tech-aware users won't, either. The data source is less vague that Compete's, but I still have to take a big grain of salt when evaluating numbers on Alexa, especially for sites that are not in the top 100,000 in terms of traffic. Still, I look at the data to see if there are nuggets to glean.

Quantcast is relatively new and is taking on Alexa and Compete head-on. Quantcast's big advantage is that they use both Google analytics style data gathering, where you need to install a snippet of Javascript on your pages, and correlation of any other bits of data they can find. For example, when a user comes from JoeSchmoe.com to KidPub, there's data in the HTTP header that indicates where the user was before they hit KidPub (assuming they came via a lnk), and Quantcast uses that to record traffic information about JoeSchmoe, even if they don't have the Javascript snippet installed. They also try to provide demographic information...age of user, income level, and so on...though personally I think that sort of data is a bit suspect. They also allow you to compare sites and have an interesting 'media planner' tool that lets you find sites that meet specific demographics.

Here's a Quantcast chart of demographics for KidPub:





All three are free and they complement each other in terms of what data you see. If I had to pick only one I'd go with Quantcast for the simple reason that I trust their data source. As you might expect, the reports are similar to Google Analytics...they should be, as they rely on similar data gathering techniques. I use Quantcast to track the 'rank' of Kidpub (we are, according to Quantcast, the 112,582nd most popular site on the web right now), and Compete to get a quick monthly look at competitive trends. Alexa is last on my list, and I don't really trust their data, but I do look at it weekly to validate my other sources.

Google Analytics tells me intimitate details about what's happening on my own site, and the other three give me hints about what my competititors are up to. All of it is valuable data.

Fun With Feedjit

Just a fun little post today as I work on getting a few books moved along the production cycle.

Several months ago I installed a little widget at KidPub from Feedjit. It's a map of visitors. "Oh boy," you're probably thinking, "Another map with little dots. How very Web 2.0."

But wait! Apart from the fun of watching your visitors move across the globe with the sun, you can actually gather some useful information from Feedjit. Clicking on the small map will take you to your Feedjit site, which is a Google Maps mashup showing each visitor and (here's the fun bit) what they're viewing on your site. It looks something lke this:



A little hard to see here (click for full-size), but you get stats on what's currently happening on the site, including the most popular page views in the displayed geographic region.

I don't use it that often, but KidPub members like it, and if we've published something specific to a region it's useful to take a look a few times during the day to see if interest has been piqued. Its a good way to take a quick look at traffic, too. The performance hit is minimal as the geolocation lookup is done on the Feedjit side. You are handing a third party data about your users, but hey, we all sold our visitors' souls out a long time ago, eh?