How I Check My Search Rankings For Free

So to get the ball rolling we’ll start with something very easy. The problem:- You want to know where you website is ranking for certain search words/phrases. Ideally you want this information over time so you can see how your rankings are changing but you really don’t want the hassle of manually trawling through result pages looking for your website.

The great news is that there is a tool that lets you do this 100% for free, it’s called WebCEO. Once you’ve got WebCEO downloaded and installed your first job is to “Add New Site”, it’s all really simple stuff. Add your URL and a name for your website. Now your site is added you can start the “Check Rankings” tool. You’ll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:-

WebCEO ranking checker

As you can see there are 3 things that you have to do. Decide what search engines you want to check for rankings, what keywords/phrases you are looking to rank for and finally how deep to scan each search engine. I normally scan to a depth of 4 pages, any deeper than that and you’re not “really” ranking.

WebCEO has a huge list of search engines and directories that you can check your rankings in. One of the features that I really like is that it allows you to see where you are in the various regional varieties of Google. Not being based in America this is very important to me.

WebCEO ranking search engines

Once you’re setup you can run it for the first time, WebCEO will go away and try and find your site for each phrase/keyword. Once it’s finished you can check your positions in a variety of ways (e.g. by search engine, keyword etc) There is also very comprehensive history reporting allowing you to see how things have changed.

WebCEO ranking results

So that’s your ranking check setup, however ideally you don’t want to have to run this manually. More good news. WebCEO has a built in scheduler, now you’ve configured your Check Ranking task you can automatically run it using the scheduler at whatever interval you choose. To be honest I tend not to check mine any more frequently than every 2 weeks - 1 month because rankings bob up and down all the time. Checking this stuff daily could drive you insane! It’s much easier to look for and try to react to trends.

WebCEO ranking scheduler

The WebCEO ranking checker is actually a very powerful tool and there can be a lot more to it than what I’ve shown here. My goal was just to show you a very simple of way of monitoring your search rankings for free. Experience tells me at this point a bunch of Mac users will start whinging “what about me?” There are probably programs out there that will do the same or a similar job job but the harsh truth is that as a Mac user you are in a minority, a huge majority of software is written for the Windows platform so I’d suggest you get yourself a good emulator. Alternatively think about maybe getting some cheap Windows VPS hosting. There are a number of services out there that offer a Windows VPS for considerably less than $99 a month that you can install your own software on.

Next in the series:- I’m going to show you how to find your own valuable expired domain names so that you’ve no need for the Domain Marketplace.

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POSTED BY Paul B on Oct 5 under Make Money Online

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1 Comment so far

Armen Shirvanian October 21, 2008 7:38 am

This program WebCEO looks like it could be useful, and being free is advantageous in comparison to the many products that are similar to this but cost quite a bit. I will give it a try and follow the criteria you have laid out here.

Armen Shirvanian’s last blog post..Quality Builds On Itself