In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained that the results you see on the search results pages for Google and Bing do not matter anymore. You simply can't search for keywords in hopes to get an accurate portrayal of how people find your website.As of today there are no tools that can give you an accurate portrayal without scrapping data. "Scrapping data" is the process of capturing the results from a search results page and saving it for some reporting purpose. Several search engine optimization software companies do it even though it's against Google terms of service.
In yesterday's Nugget I also said that you need to view the Search Query report in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT for short) in order to see a somewhat accurate portrayal of how you rank for a keyword. I'll expand upon that now...
Inside GWT you can see the keyword raking report by clicking on Traffic, then Search Queries.
The report shows a blue line for the total number of times your website appeared in the search results (called impressions) and the red line shows the total number of times people clicked on those impressions. Below the graph is the list of keyword phrases that will give you the portrayal of what your keywords are doing.
Since every person has a personalized search results experience, your keywords will usually show an average position with a decimal number. Any keyword with a rank of 10 or less will probably show as a decimal, and those of 11 or more will show as a whole number.
The decimal number is the average position for the total people shown in the Impressions column.
The report should show that you rank in the #1 or #2 position for your exact store name, and probably 5 or less for more permutations of your store name.
You can sort the report by the Average Position to see your best ranking keywords and your worst ranking.
For a jewelry store, common words in the 10 or higher position list will include "jewelry," "jewelry store," "fine jewelers," and your store's name. You might also find the names of several of the designer name that you have listed on your website.
Take a careful look at the list of keywords show with an average position of 20 or greater. Those words are appearing on page 3 or more of the search results, and people probably are not seeing them. Within that list, you should look for and make a list of the keywords that are important for your business.
Use that list of keywords as a list of topics for your next round of blogs that you write. Each blog you write will help increase the ranking position for that keyword topic. You might have to write a few blogs about a specific topic before the ranking gets to the 1 to 10 range.
One final note about this GWT Search Query report... Keywords that don't appear in the list can either mean that your website didn't rank for that word at all, or that no one searched for that keyword during the last 30 days.
Remember that your website cannot rank for a keyword at all if it doesn't appear anywhere on your site. So before you ask why a keyword is not in the list you first needs to find out if the word is used anywhere on your website.
