Pandia discusses the role of search engine rankings in online marketing and reviews a new tool that helps you keep track of your own results.

There used to be a time when a number one position in the search engines was considered the highway to online marketing heaven. More people used to click on the three top positions than all the others combined.

Mixing different types of results

Lately things have become slightly more complicated.

Google’s Universal Search mixes results from various databases, including regular web pages, news sites, image and video listings and blog posts.

Bing sorts results into several topic sections, encouraging searchers to scan the whole of the first search engine result page before clicking.

This means that more of the first page of results become valuable marketing property.

That doesn’t change the old saying, though: Being on page 1 for a popular search query will bring you a lot of traffic.

Personalization

Then there is the case of personalization: All search engines will give a different mix of search results to people in different geographical locations.

The search results at google.co.uk are not the same as the one found by an American searching google.com.

Search engines will even use your IP address to serve you search results tailored to your city, county or state.

If you have activated personalized search in Google, Google will also take your personal search history into account.

This means that two persons sitting in the same room may, in extreme cases, get different search results.

Search engine intelligence

That being said: There continues to be a large amount of overlap between the various versions of search engine results, especially for sites and services with a global appeal.

This means that it still makes sense to keep track of your general search engine popularity to get a feeling for how well your search engine optimization strategies are working.

Given that your local search results may vary from the ones of someone at the other site of the world, it actually makes sense to use data generated from one destination. In this way you get comparable data that can be used to measure the success of your search engine strategy over time.

KPMRS

KRMRS is an acronym for Keyword Positioning Monitoring Positioning Reporting Service. It is a new free search engine positioning tracking service that lets you compare your rankings for selected keyword phrases on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Unlike some web search analytics tools, they keep it very simple. Enter the query and the url of your site and click go and you get your position for the major search engines.

If you sign up for the free subscription you will be asked to list your most important queries. KPMRS then gives you a result page that lists your positions for all these keyword phrases.

You can sign up for email alerts telling you when your position has changed or one of your competitors have outranked you. You will also get a weekly report. (Go to “Settings” to select or deselect these services).

What you get

If you subscribe KPMRS will give you several options for each site:

• Keyword analysis
  (search engine rankings for your selected queries)
• Page Rank
  (the Google page rank indicator for the home page of your site)
• Alexa ranking
  (data from the users of the Alexa toolbar, although this one didn’t seem to work when we tested it)
• Track back links
  (gives the number of pages linking back to your site. We are not sure where they get this number. The figure for pandia.com was very low, even lower than the one reported by Google. Google only reports a fraction of back-links. Yahoo gives a much more correct figure.)
• Social activity
  (probably a measure of visibility in social web sites. This function is under construction).

KPMRS does to a certain extent take geographical variation into account as it lets you search one of two data sets: US or UK search engines. The US version gave the results we asked for. The UK version reported N/A for all keyword phrases and search engines.

A lot of potential

We like the simplicity of this service and we think it has a lot of potential. It may be especially useful for those that do not have the time or skills needed to sift through all the data generated by more complex web analytics tools.

We have a few suggestions for improvement, though:

• If there are missing data, as the ones for the UK and Alexa in our test, give an error message that makes sense to the user, like: “data will be available within 24 hours” or something similar.
• Tell how the back-link number is generated, or better: give us both Google and Yahoo data.
• Make the ranking results click-able: If you click on the Google rank for a particular query, KPMRS should open the relevant Google search results in a new page or frame.
• Avoid warnings like: “NOTE - Best viewed in Firefox and Internet Explorer!” It should work for all the most important browsers, including Safari and Opera.
• Add links to a FAQ page that explains to newbies what Page Rank or an Alexa ranking entail.

Click here to take KPMRS for a spin!

photo credit: Mariano Kamp