If you are viewing your keyword ranking report and have questions, here is the place to get answers. We have been monitoring your website’s search engine rankings weekly to provide feedback on the visibility of your site on the primary search engines.  This report is available to you on a monthly basis under our SEO maintenance plan.

Newsweek said it best:  “If you're not indexed by Google, your website pretty much doesn't exist.  And if you're a business with a high page rank—a key metric that determines whether your site will be displayed high in the results for a given query, or buried a few hundred mouseclicks back—you can count on a thriving online trade". For this reason, companies large and small are now realizing how critical ongoing optimization is and are turning to SOHO for SEO maintenance.

Each tab has detailed information about your website including the targeted keywords, the search engines they are ranked in, and how the rankings have changed over time.  These reports provide results for the top three search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN).  

Once you open the report you will notice four tabs:

Summary Tab
The summary tab shows the overall performance of your website.  The visibility statistics section describes how many keywords are in the #1 position, top 5 positions, top 10 positions etc., as well as how many positions have changed from last week to this week. This page also provides a visibility percentage which is based on the number of keywords and the position they hold (more details are included in the FAQ pdf), your top keywords, and general statistics.

Visibility Tab
The visibility tab describes how visible your website is to the search engines using two factors 1) number of pages indexed in all three search engines and 2) number of other websites that link to your website in each search engine.

Engine Tab
The Engine tab provides a complete list of keywords and shows which of the keywords are listed in the top 100 positions in each major search engine.

URL/Keyword Tab
The URL/Keyword Tab allows you to see which keyword ranks in which search engines and which page of your website is being ranked.  This report also tells you each ranking for that keyword compared to the previous week’s results.

If you have any further questions regarding your keyword ranking report please read on to get all the FAQs. If the FAQs do not answer your questions please feel free to contact us.

Keyword Ranking Summary Tab - FAQ

The report Summary provides a summarized view of your mission data, including your site’s visibility on the search engines, your engine and keyword listings, the number of search engine queries for each run date, and general statistics about the data SOHO analyzed.

Note:  When reading report graphs, keep in mind that the axis of a graph that shows dates is not a true time scale. Each date corresponds to the last mission run on that date and the graph shows changes from one mission to the next. However, the spaces between dates are fixed and do not indicate the time interval between missions. For example, a graph showing data for the dates 2010-01-01 and 2010-01-02 will have the same spacing as a graph showing data for 2010-03-01 and 2010-05-15.

This report also shows your total rankings appearing in the top 5, top 10, top 20, and top 30 matches, as well as the number of rankings that moved up, the number of rankings that moved down, and the number that stayed the same since you last ran the mission.  An overall visibility score and visibility percentage show exactly how visible your site is on the Web at a glance.  Never again will you have to guess whether you're making progress in your campaign, or waste time computing these numbers by hand.

Visibility Statistics

This table provides an overview of the pages found in the top 1, 5, 20, and 30 positions, as well as information about how many pages changed rank.

Listings for Top 5 Engines

This graph and table provide information about how many times your site was listed for the 5 engines that returned the highest number of listings.

General Statistics

This table provides information about the date when the Reporter mission ran, the number of keywords and search engines that were analyzed, and the number of matches that were scanned.

Archives

If you enabled archiving, this table shows a list of archived reports. Click a link to display the report for that date. To enable archiving for future reports, select Options > Archive in your mission settings and select the Archive current report results check box.

Visibility Score

The Visibility Score table and graph provide composite scores that can help you assess how well your site ranked overall on the queried search engines as well as how well it ranked. Visibility Score is calculated by assigning a point value to the highest position achieved on each engine. A point value is only awarded to the positions 1 through 30, with a position of 1 being awarded 30 points, position 2 is worth 29 points, 3 is 28 points and so on through 30 which is given 1 point. The points are then summed for all engines queried in the mission.

Visibility Percentage is calculated using the Visibility Score and dividing it by the maximum points available. Available points are calculated by multiplying the number of engines by the number of keywords. If the mission consisted of 2 engines and 2 keywords for each engine, then the maximum points possible would be 120, or 4 first place positions being awarded 30 points each.

Here is an example using 2 keywords on 2 engines of a mission:

Engine              Keywords         Position                        Points

#1                     #1                     2                      29

#1                     #2                     7                      24

#2                     #1                     28                     3

#2                     #2                     Not in first 30    0

Total                                         56

56 / 120 = .4666 or 46.66%

The Visibility Score for the above example would be 56. The Visibility Percentage is 46.66%.

As a result, the higher the percentage, the higher the visibility. If all 4 searches had returned a number one ranking, the Visibility Score would be 120 and the Visibility Percentage would be 100%. Don't worry if you do not ever achieve a 100% score when targeting a large number of keywords. Few people reach or approach a "perfect" score. The purpose of this score is to simply give you a baseline for monitoring improvement over time. Obviously, the fewer keywords you target, the easier it will be to approach 100%. However, the greater the number of popular keywords you can achieve top rankings on within the major engines, the more traffic you can expect to receive. Traffic and the resulting sales should be your ultimate goal.

Listings for Top 5 Keywords

This graph and table provide information about how many times your site was listed for the 5 keywords that returned the highest number of listings.

Search Engine Queries

This graph and table provide information about how many search engine queries SOHO used to calculate your mission results. Current queries shows the number of queries used the last time SOHO ran the mission. Total queries shows the total number of queries for all the times the mission has run.