Market Appeal

Archive for June, 2009

Anyone even remotely involved in internet marketing or, specifically, SEO (search engine optimisation) will be familiar with the need to check a website’s rankings on a regular basis.

While to the uninitiated that may sound like a simple requirement, it can actually be more challenging task than it first appears.

The basic steps are as follows:

1. Create your keyword lists to track
2. List your websites to track including your own and a couple of competitors
3. Decide which search engines to track

That all sounds quite straightforward, however, if you have a large website, or several of them, then you’ll need to track your rankings for several different keyword lists. You may also have several of your own websites to track each of which has several direct competitors’ websites rankings that you also need to follow.

Further, you may be interested in your rankings in several different search engines typically including (but not necessarily limited to) Google.co.uk (web), Google.co.uk (UK only), Google.com, Yahoo.co.uk, Yahoo.com, Bing.co.uk and Bing.com.

Finally, if you’re in an established market such as recruitment or property (real estate) then vertical search engines specific to your niche may also be of value and so require tracking too. With, say, 3 keyword lists per website; 3 websites, each with 3 competitors and 7 major search engines that’s already 189 (3x3x3x7) ranking reports to run per month – or daily or weekly as required.

For search engine marketing agencies with multiple clients the situations even worse, with potentially thousands of reports to be updated, repacked in their company’s colours and then emailed to clients on a regular basis.

The solution – Advanced Web Ranking’s automated reporting

Thankfully, despite the obvious overheads running regular ranking reporting for multiple sites is not an insurmountable challenge due to the advent of advanced software that can take the grunt work out of the process.

For example, with the enterprise version of Advanced Web Ranking’s (AWR)  ranking report software you can easily set up and update “projects” that each contain the rankings for your sets of keyword lists, websites and search engines.

Agencies with assorted clients simply have to set up multiple projects and then schedule them to update automatically at a convenient time, such as overnight, so that they’re ready for you to review in the morning. Moreover, the projects can themselves be grouped too, allowing even large agencies to centrally manage their reporting with ease.

Other features include lots of pretty charts and graphs to help visualise ranking changes making it easier to assess your progress at a glance and full style sheet customisation allowing you to tailor titles and auto-insert your company’s logo (and clients’ too) making branding a breeze.

Of course, so far I’ve only mentioned high-level issues to do with account management, but what if you need help with the earlier stages too. For example, perhaps you haven’t yet created your keyword lists and so aren’t yet ready to start. Yet again, AWR has the answer, with several integrated keyword tools to help you scan your website for likely keywords (and comapre it to others websites too) and then use Google suggest to add those that you’ve missed before looking up their search volume and level of competition, just to be sure.

Finally, with thousands of reports to run, even simply emailing them out to the right recipients can be a nightmare. However, Caphyon the creators of Advanced Web Ranking have an answer for that too. Along with automated report update scheduling you can set customised versions of each websites reports to be automatically sent out to their own distribution lists turning monthly reporting into a one-off set-up task.

Conclusion

With all of the aforementioned features and more besides, it may come as no surprise that many web marketing agencies (including ours) use Advanced Web Ranking  ranking report software to manage much of their ongoing search engine ranking reporting, as that frees their staff up for other tasks such as data analysis and account management rather than tying them up with endless reporting. The question is, how do you do yours?

Regular readers of this blog would have been forgiven for thinking that we’d gone away, given that we haven’t posted anything for over six weeks, however, nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, we’ve been rather busy behind the scenes recently and so have several announcements to make about our progress to date and some new projects that we’re looking forward to.

New hire: Joe Lewis – SEO Consultant

Last month, Joe Lewis joined us as an SEO Consultant from Trinity Mirror plc on a full-time basis. Joe and I have been friends since our time studying psychology at Brunel University and he’s frequently moonlighted for Market Appeal over the past couple of years, while working in SEO for DLG and, later, Trinity Mirror.

Joe now has considerable practical experience, having been one of the two SEO consultants overseeing their 200+ regional websites, and, as our second technical consultant, will be playing a key role as we continue to expand. Besides, several new clients have started this month, so it looks like Joe’s arrived just time!

New business partner & Limited trading status

Coinciding with Joe’s arrival was the news that we’d finally agreed the terms of an investment-partnership with BBMR LLP. As a result, we can confirm that Market Appeal has raised some additional capital to help accelerate its expansion and keep up with increasing demand for our organic and paid search marketing services.

Further, we’re changing over our trading status from “Market Appeal” as a private company to “Market Appeal Ltd.” and are delighted to announce that Darren Best will be joining our board as BBMR’s nominated Director.

After over a decade atop London’s commercial property market, Darren has extensive business acumen and an address book full of contacts and so is another welcome addition to our team.

Other news

While it’s still too early to crack open the bubbly, we’re making good progress and have more plans in store. Top of the list is to redesign our website, as we’ve outgrown the current one’s functionality and design. As a result, we’re investigating alternatives to WordPress and may yet migrate the (non-blog) pages to Joomla or another similar CMS.

As web analytics professionals, we’re always interested in new ways to track where our customers come from and so we’ve been speaking to  a telephone-tracking provider of late with a view to offering an integrated web, phone and chat analytics solution to our clients in the near future.

This should be particularly useful for consulting, B2B and professional services businesses, as, unlike their e-commerce counterparts, almost all of their “orders” are taken over the phone, making it hard to track their progress, with most web analytics packages.