If you have started marketing your website in the search engines, I want to applaud you. You’ve taken a big step to making your website a success. Once you’ve started search marketing for your website, it’s important to track how you are doing in the search engines, measure the success of your efforts, and find ways to improve your results.
Here are five free tools to help you measure the search marketing for your website:
1. Ranking Reports:
You’ve put in hours of work researching keywords and optimizing your website. It’s time to see how you’ve done. Searching manually can take forever, so it’s best to find a search ranking tool to do the work for you. Mikes Marketing Tools has a nice ranking reporter that allows you to check your websites rankings. It’s important to check your rankings regularly as the search engines results are constantly changing.
2. Alexa:
Alexa is a website that collects website traffic information. If your website has been around a little while and gets some traffic, then Alexa probably has some traffic stats for your website. You can see information about where people are coming from, what keywords they are using to find your site, and see how your site’s traffic compares to other sites with the Alexa traffic ranking. BTW – The lower the ranking number the better.
3. Link Reports:
On page SEO is important to do, but it’s also important to get backlinks (other sites linking back to your site). Generally, the more backlinks you have the better. So, it’s good to keep track of how many backlinks your website has and whether that number is increasing. SEOmoz has a good link reporter for that information. I should note that while having more backlinks is generally better, you really want to have links from relevant and authoritative sites.
4. Website Grader:
Websitegrader.com is great tool that tracks several online marketing metrics and then gives your website a grade. The higher the grade, the better you’re doing. The report also breaks down the grade so you can see where you need to improve. One thing to note, however, is that the websitegrader.com includes social marketing metrics in their grade, such as blogging and social bookmarking, in addition to SEO metrics. So, if you haven’t started social media marketing, then your website’s grade will be a little lower.
5. Google Analytics:
The piece de resistance is website analytics. Website analytics can give you a vast amount of information about your website traffic, marketing campaigns, and how visitors interact with your website. Google Analytics is among the best analytics programs and it’s completely free. When you start off you may just want to track the over all traffic and keyword information, but if you want more information, you can track individual marketing campaigns, set goals for your website, and much more.
Knowing how well your marketing efforts are working allows you to make better marketing decisions in the future. For example, if you find that after optimizing your site for a particular keyword your website still doesn’t rank well for it, then you can either decide to target a different, less competitive keyword, or work on targeting that keyword with link building. With better marketing decisions you can continue to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and the success of your website.
Let us know what you think about these tools. Are there other tools you use that you would recommend?
OurChurch.Com Director of Marketing Services
Kurt serves as OurChurch.Com’s Director of Marketing Services, bringing over 20 years of expertise in search marketing, and has developed numerous marketing services and served hundreds of churches, schools, ministries, and businesses.
He has authored more than 500 articles on the subject, contributing to platforms like the Christian SEO Guys blog and Church Marketing University, and is an active participant on LocalSearchForum.com.
In addition to his professional accomplishments, Kurt is an ordained minister, serving as pastor at Faith Lutheran Church in Wesley Chapel, FL, demonstrating his commitment to both faith and community. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree from Georgia Southern University. He also holds a Specific Ministry Pastor Certificate and a General Pastor Certificate from Concordia Seminary.
1 Comment
When I originally left a comment I seem to have clicked on the -Notify
me when new comments are added- checkbox and now every time
a comment is added I get 4 emails with the exact same comment.
Perhaps there is an easy method you are able to remove me from that service?
Appreciate it!