Step #2: Assess your current search ranking
In order to improve your ranking, you’ll need to know where you stand now. This is true even for new sites. Thankfully, there are several tools and resources that can help you.
Use SERPs.com to check your site’s keyword rank
If you’ve been targeting specific keywords in page content, use SERPs.com to assess your rank. Type in your keyword (I used “content marketing” in this example) and your site URL. You also have other options like looking at Yahoo results, choosing between desktop or mobile, and drilling down on local rankings by city or ZIP code.
The results page will show a few items:
- Where your site ranks in search engines for the term
- The first page on your site that comes up in search results for the topic
- Your average monthly searches
- Your average cost-per-click for the keyword (for paid search like Google AdWords)
Check your site speed
Next, it’s important to check site speed, as this is a major Google ranking factor.
If your site is slow, you have little chance of a high search position. It will affect your ability to convert and sell new customers, too.
According to WebPerformanceToday, Walmart experienced a sharp decline in conversions when its page load times increased from one to four seconds.
If this happens, it doesn’t matter what your on-page SEO, meta description, or title tags are. The search algorithm will punish you, even if you’re a giant like Walmart.
That’s why it’s important to run your own site speed test to figure out how to improve Google rankings. There are dozens of tools that can help you do this. Some of my favorites are:
Here’s how to test your page content speed with Pingdom.
Go to tools.pingdom.com and type in your URL. Choose the location you’d like to test from and click “Start Test.”
Quick Sprout registers a performance grade of 81. As long as your site registers over 50, that’s a good start.
If you get a performance grade of less than 50, your page content is really slow and you need to work on improving it.
Check the page load time, too.
Quick Sprout is doing pretty well at 1.89 seconds. Aim for under 2 seconds for a really fast site and under one second for mobile devices. According to a research cited by Optimizely, artificial latency included in the Telegraph’s website caused an
Check your site’s health
After looking at keyword search engine rank and site speed, assess the health of your site before you start to optimize.
Have you experienced a sudden drop in organic traffic after months or years of consistency?
Are you wondering whether Google has deindexed (or banned) your site?
There are a lot of great tools to help piece together this puzzle. Try the MxToolBox Domain Health Report tool to check for major issues in 5 different categories: general site problems, blacklist, mail server, web server, and DNS.
Just click the box for each category to see specific errors and warnings. From there, you can work one-by-one to fix them.
If you want to check if you’ve been penalized by one of the major algorithm updates, check out FE International’s Website Penalty Indicator tool.
You’ll see a graph that shows your site’s traffic in relation to rollouts of major updates. This comparison takes you one step closer to knowing if an update directly affected your site.
Another aspect of site health to search engines is domain age. While Matt Cutts said in this video that “the difference between a six-month-old domain and a one-year-old domain name is not huge at all,” that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.
Search algorithms will still see it and value seniority.
SerpIQ analyzed over 160,000 SERPs and 1.6 million URLs and concluded that domain age contributed to #1 rankings for the majority of the domain names in their study:
This also means that you need to be patient. As your domain ages and the links pointing to your site age, your search engine ranking should increase.
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