Small Business SEO Explained: How to check your SEO rankings. What matters to your SEO program?

Small business SEO tips - how to check your SEO rankings. If you're doing SEO for your small business and you want to know if it's working, then this week's episode will help you. I'm going to walk you through what you want to track and what those numbers mean so you can start to see how things are working. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to walk you through a question that I get quite often, and that is, "Rachel, how do I know if my SEO is working? How do I check my rankings? What am I supposed to be tracking? How do I even know if what I'm doing is right?" So I wanted to kind of walk you through what it looks like, what you want to see, what you wanna track, how often you wanna look at these things, so that you know whether or not what you're doing is working. So I know if you're like me, you're a small business owner, you're getting a monthly report from Google Search Console, and you may be looking at that and seeing it gives you some traffic insights, it gives you some ranking insights, it gives you some click-through details. I'll be honest, I want you to ignore it. Now, I know most people treat that Google Search Console report as kind of the be-all, end-all of what you're doing from an SEO standpoint, but what I want you to understand is that that report has nothing to do with what you are actually trying to do from an SEO standpoint. And so it is Google telling you, "This is where you show up. These are the keywords that you're getting traffic for. These are the pages that are getting traffic." And so it's helpful. It's useful. You should take a look at it and kind of understand where does Google think that you fit. However, Google doesn't know which of those keywords actually are applicable to your business. It doesn't know which ones matter, and it sure doesn't know which ones you're working on unless you've actually gone in and, like, tagged them and marked them so that you know which ones they are. So when I was in the agency world, we did not use Search Console for this type of information. We used it to make sure that the sites were indexed, Google could read the sites, all of that, but we didn't really put a lot of weight into the keyword data that it gave us. We use it as directional information and insights, but we don't use it to make final decisions. What we use to make final decisions are keyword research tools and keyword reporting tools. So the good news is most research tools also have reporting available, especially if you have a paid tool. So most of my students use, um, Ubersuggest. It is a more affordable SEO tool than what we use in the corporate world. So in the corporate and agency world, we use things like Semrush, we use Moz, we might... Like, there's other ones that we use, but they're significantly more expensive. They're generally cost-prohibitive for small business owners. So I recommend Ubersuggest for my students, and most of my clients use it as well because it's a, a low monthly cost. They also will run promotions where you can get lifetime access. That's what I use. That's what I teach. So what we look at there- Is what are the keywords that I am actively working on? What are the keywords I have chosen, I have done my research on, and I have used on the appropriate pages on my website? Those are the keywords you should be tracking in your keyword tracking report. We wanna look at those about once a month. We don't wanna look at them every day because the reality is Google's rankings can be volatile. Things can move up and down quite a bit. So we look at 'em no more than every other week, and we don't wanna make a change or a strategic decision about a keyword until we've seen more than 30 days where it has moved up or down. And generally, the only time we're really making a big change is if it's moved down. So first thing we're gonna do is look at those keyword rankings, and we're gonna use an actual keyword ranking tool for that, not just the report we get from Search Console. So you're gonna set that up. If you haven't done it yet, I do have an affiliate link in the description for Ubersuggest. You can get that. It gives you a little discount. I don't remember exactly what it gives you, but it gives you a little discount. It'll let you get started. You can start tracking the words that you are actively working on in your Ubersuggest account. You can also use that for keyword research. There's a lot. If you're one of my students, you have the trainings and the demonstrations and the walkthroughs for that within the program, so you don't have to try to figure it out on your own. Now, the next thing we're gonna look at, so we're gonna look at those keyword rankings. We're also gonna wanna take a look periodically at our domain authority. So there are different tools that you can use to find the domain authority. Um, one that I teach my students to use is Keywords Everywhere. That's one where we can actually do some keyword research right within Google Search or Google... Yeah, Go- right within Google Chrome. It's a Chrome plugin. It is a paid tool to be able to get more of the data and the insights, but it is one I like. It's one I teach the students to use. So Keywords Everywhere will give you that domain authority data. MozBar will give it. Open Site Explorer. There's different places that you can get that data. Now, domain authority is just an indication of how authoritative do we believe this website is. It is not a number that comes from Google. It actually comes from Moz, which is one of the core original SEO tools. It is based as closely as we can get it to the Google ranking algorithm with the caveat that the ranking algorithm is kind of like Big Mac sauce. It's a secret. We don't know exactly what it is. So we don't know if it's exact, but what we have seen over the years is the higher the domain authority, the more likely the website is to rank for any given keyword. And your- Your domain authority tends to go up as you earn more links and over time. So the longer you've had your site, the more links you've earned, the more authoritative your site is, the more likely Google is going to think that you are a good resource for the search that somebody is having, and the more likely they are to rank you. Now, you wanna look at that about once a month. Your domain authority may go up or down. It may stay s- stay steady for a long period of time. If it has dropped, more than likely you've lost some backlinks that you had previously. If you're using a tool like Ubersuggest, it's actually going to keep track for you and tell you how many new links you got in a month, and it'll show you which links you've lost and all of that The third thing that we wanna look at will be your traffic reports. So you're going to want to use either Google Analytics, or the one that I prefer and that I use with my students and my clients now is Clicky Analytics. It's much easier for a- an entrepreneur, a small business owner, to find their data in Clicky and to understand it than in Google Analytics. GA has gotten quite complicated the way it's set up, especially GA4, where now you have to filter and you have to change and all sorts of views to be able to find data that you used to be able to just click and it would show up. Clicky is more a click and it shows up, so it's much more user-friendly. It is a paid tool. They have a free version. Um, if you're doing your analytics and you're trying to track your, um, goals and lead tracking and all of that, you have to pay for that part of it. I do pay for the account, and I find it to be worth it to me. But Clicky is an easier one to use. What you're gonna wanna look at is how much organic traffic are you getting. So how many searches or how many people are finding you through organic search? You're also going to wanna look, because now we're talking about AI-based search, you're also going to wanna look to see how many people are finding you through AI search. So in Clicky, it actually has its own little AI icon right there in the traffic report. In Google Analytics, again, you're going to have to filter for this. So it's gonna show up under referral traffic, and then you'll have to filter within referral to find out how much was ChatGPT, how much was Claude, um, how much was Perplexity, et cetera. So if you're doing your SEO, you're working on growing an SEO strategy for your small business, and you're curious how to check your rankings, that's what you're gonna wanna look at. You're going to want to track your keyword rankings over time. You want to hopefully see them get smaller, meaning the number gets smaller, because that means you're moving further to the top of the page, closer to the top. The sites that are at the top of the page get more traffic. Then you're also going to wanna look at your domain authority, because over time, we want your domain authority number to get bigger. Your site becomes more authoritative, so we want a smaller number on rankings. We want a bigger number on domain authority. And then finally, we wanna look at our traffic because we want to see what is that visibility doing for us. How many people are actually getting to our website? So we wanna see organic We wanna see referral or AI traffic. The other thing that we're seeing a nice increase in for many sites is direct traffic, and the correlation there is believed to be because of AI overviews and so many people seeing additional information about businesses. People are more likely just to go directly to the website today than they were previously because we've seen a big increase in direct traffic in the last, like, 12 to 18 months correlates very closely with the increase in AI-based search. So if you're curious, you're working on this, you're trying to do it, you really wanna understand how everything you're doing works together and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, do yourself a favor, join me in Simple SEO Content or work with me one-on-one and let me help you get this set up for your business so that you know what to track, when to track, where to find those numbers. I'm even gonna give you the tracking templates and all of that if you're in my world as a student or a client. I'm gonna help you not only understand what the numbers mean, where to find them, and then more importantly, what to do with them. What do these numbers mean, and how do you make decisions based on those numbers? So if you've been learning, trying to figure this out on your own and you're ready to get started, join me in Simple SEO Content. You can go to the freebies tab on the website and get signed up for the next live class that's coming up in just a couple of weeks, and I would love to have you in there. There'll be the challenge week, and then followed by that, we will kick off the July cohort of the group. All right, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.