Keyword Ranking Report

(Available in Optimizer Only)

The Keyword Ranking Report is included within the Search Report, even though it is basically a different type of report. It has been integrated into the Search Report because there is there is a very strong potential for a relationship between how you rank for certain keywords and the traffic you receive from them.

You can shift into Keyword Ranking mode by clicking on the icon at the top of the page, just as you would shift between the other modes of the report. However, whereas all the other modes of the report are based on data analyzed from the log files, the Keyword Ranking data is gather from the search engines themselves. It does not show information about how visitors behave on your site, but rather, how they got there in the first place.

Configuring the Keyword Ranking Report

You can configure your Keyword Ranking Report by clicking on the 'Configure' button in the top-right of the report. This will take you to the Options dialog. In the Options page you can set the number of keywords that you want to check. It will start with the keywords that generated the most visits to your site and work down from there. The default setting is 50, meaning it will get ranking reports for the top 50 keywords. The higher you set this number, the longer it will take to generate the report.

You can also set the depth of the search with the 'Generate __ results per keyword' setting. The default is 20, meaning it will check to see if your site shows up in the top 20 results for that keyword. Again, the higher you set this number the longer your report will take to generate.

The Keyword Ranking Report utilizes the APIs provided by the three top search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yahoo has an open API, meaning we can gather data from it with no key necessary. Google and MSN require you to enter an API key before you can access data. To enter your API keys, go to Options -> Keyword Ranking. Fields are provided for the Google and API keys. If you don't yet have an API key, links are provided to the registration forms for each search engine. Acquiring a key is a very simple matter of providing an email address to the search engine. Once you have entered your keys, you will be able to get rankings from that search engine.

Get Rankings

Generating a search engine report involves accessing the search engine APIs over the web. You will need to be connected to the Internet in order for this to work. To run a report, click the "Get Rankings" button in the top-right corner of the Search Report while in Keyword Ranking mode. Running this report can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

What the data means

The keywords displayed in this mode are the same ones listed in the other modes of the Search Report, listed in the same order (order of most visitors). Within each cell there is either a number or a dash. Numbers represent the position your site shows up in the search results. If there is a dash, it means your site did not show up in the top n search results, (where n is the number you set in the 'Generate n results per keyword'. Each of the characters in the cells are clickable, and will pop open a browser showing the specific search engine results referred to.

Note: The search engine results may not match what is shown in the report exactly. Keyword rankings can change at any time, and Google in particular serves search results from different servers that are not necessarily synchronized. So the report may have been generated by querying one server and the browser may be querying a different server with different results. And of course, reports generated in the past are likely to show different results. The browser is showing the current results.

Viewing historical data

Each time you run a report by clicking the 'Get Rankings' button, the data is stored for future reference. You can view changes over time by clicking on the left-pointing arrow for any given keyword. This will expand that keyword to show the data for each different date when reports were run.