Use the right tools for the job!

During major upheavals in the search engine world many SEOs and affiliates are left pissing in the wind. The range of emotions you pass through follow a regular course: anger, depression, resentment, determination, curiosity and enthusiasm. Those that end up failling stop at the next: resignation. Below you’ll find some tips to prevent this happening to you in the future.

The desire to give up is the most evil there is. I’ve been so close at various points of my 14 years of doing SEO and 10 years being an affiliate. Major shifts like these have brought me to the brink so many times. But thankfully, not once in the past five or six. The reason why is that back when I last took a Google whack I decided to do things properly, try and create content in an area that I had a passion for and was heavily “likeable” in the social media sense.

I’ve also never had a client that’s had a major whack either – a client that I was with long enough to turn the ship before the ice berg appeared. The reason for this is analysis, analysis, analysis (and not being a sucker for current SEO fads). I’ve gone through the automated ranking analysis of Web Position Gold, by hand, through SEOmoz and I’ve finally found my perfect partner: Advanced Web Ranking.

Having clients and doing SEO for my own sites means that you need a tool that can basically do everything. All of my clients have different needs, some just love summary reports to get an overview of general performance, some like to have detailed information on a handful of keywords and others like to have specific trend reports on a wide of keywords – this does the job. And if you’re suffering from a Panda hangover it’ll do the job for you too.

Here’s how to use it in a “shit my traffic has tanked” sense (I don’t have the top level package at the mo, so some stuff isn’t available to me):

1. Is it just you?
The first thing you need to do is work out if Google has whacked your site in particular, your industry or site-type.

A report like their visibility report will show you the overall trend of the sites between two specific dates. I’ve only used a small number of sites and keywords in the reports here as (obviously) I don’t want to use client keywords.

This should give you data to look in more detail in a particular direction. Obviously as I’ve just put this report together there’s no comparison data. As a regular user you’ll have it.

2. Get Up Close
If you’ve not been running these reports historically then you can get pre-Panda data from SEOrush.com with rankings and all. Simply match up the two sets of data – choose 250 kws with 50 or so from various sections of the keyword distribution. And then use Excel to take average ranking changes. Looking at one of a client’s competitors we thought that all those in the space were whacked, but interestingly this data proved that their average ranking (from the sample) only moved from 3.7 to 4 – others have moved a great deal more.

But don’t be fooled by that data. It’ll give you an overall picture. If traffic has stayed static or improved, you’ll want to know why. Even small sites have different sections. An affiliate blog may have post pages, categories, tag pages, search results pages etc. Large sites will have product pages, category pages, a homepage, content pages. And with that most sites split off those sections into different folders. Use COUNTIF in excel on the returned pages against those folder names to see if there’s been any big shift from sections to another. Even by eye you should be able to notice that keywords used to return your sparce category pages, for example, to more detailed content pages.

3. Look at the Page make up
If there has been a shift compare the “SEO” on them, compare yours to theirs and their pages that no longer work with those that do.

Obviously their scores are open to debate. But it’s a good overview of the different elements of the page’s make up and its place in the greater ‘web’. I’d definitely look at the page by eye too to see how ‘appealing’ it is. Take a look at how much advertising they place on the page and where, also have a look at how they use images and how they interlink and how similar the title tag and h1 tags are. But this report does give some good data that’s not easy to find with just a visual inspection.

I’d also use Google’s Webmaster Tools for their HTML suggestions too. Make sure none of them have similar title tags or meta descriptions to other pages, also check out that they’re not returning any errors (what you see visiting the page may be different to what Google sees), and check out how many internal and external pages are linking in. You may be overdoing the linking stuff. You may want to add Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO in to the mix here to for a really good look at anchor text.

4. Go Landscape
I know some people print out SERPS regularly. I’m not that anal. But perhaps I should be as their Top Sites report just basically prints out the current pages returned for your chosen keywords within a specific search engine. This is awesome to first off pick out a particular trend for the SERPS such as niche blogs ranking better than price comparison sites, or news sites over tech blogs etc. But also because it may show a new site that does things similar to you doing much better. Obviously you take that data and analyse further.

There’s so much more to Advanced Web Ranking that I’ve not touched on such as its keyword suggestion tool, its scheduling of reports, its ability to check search engines from around the world, how damn easy it is to use, how it doesn’t force a Google captcha report (it only did it once when I was doing mega loads of queries by hand at the same time to find pages to robots.txt out for a client) and how it can do awesome ranking charts, how you can export data to csv, pdf, xml, html, xls etc. If you wanted a more in-depth analysis of it then take a look at Aaron’s post.

If you’re one of those that just likes to look at your analytics to find all the data you think you need, then you’re on a one-way ticket to shitsville. Aggregate data only serves to mask problems. Roll up your sleeves and start pulling your site apart.

Time to go and see how those client fixes are performing.

Image © GingerPig2000