Tracking Organic Keyword Rankings in Google

When Key­word Rank­ings Matter

The value of key­word rank­ing reports has been hotly debated over the years. Many search mar­keters argue that tra­di­tional rank­ing reports offer lit­tle value and pro­vide a short-sighted view of your over­all organic search vis­i­bil­ity. Mar­keters can be mis­lead when top rank­ings are being reported, but for key­words with lit­tle to no search traf­fic vol­ume. The empha­sis of key­word rank­ing mon­i­tor­ing should be focused on the right key­words, actu­ally dri­ving traf­fic and conversions.

Google Refer­rer String Change

Google has recently begun rolling out changes to its refer­ring URL for­mat to include some small changes and the addi­tion of sev­eral new para­me­ters. One of the new data points included in this new refer­rer string is search rank­ing data. That’s right, search rank­ing data. This rank­ing data tells you exactly where in the search results your list­ing appeared when the user clicked.

Exam­ple of new Google refer­rer strings:

http://​www​.google​.com/​u​r​l​?​s​a​=​t​&​a​m​p​;​s​o​u​r​c​e​=​w​e​b​&​a​m​p​;​c​t​=​res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite…

The “cd” para­me­ter in the refer­rer string above iden­ti­fies the search list­ing rank­ing that appeared when the user clicked through to the site (i.e. search rank­ing = 7)

New Site­Cat­a­lyst Reporting

Omni­ture recently announced that we are pro­vid­ing new report­ing capa­bil­i­ties in Site­Cat­a­lyst to seg­ment reports by organic key­word rank­ings, based on this new Google refer­rer string change:

This new func­tion­al­ity allows clients to break­down key­words by the actual search engine rank­ings dri­ving traf­fic to their sites. This solu­tion will be pro­vided through our Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices Group.

This first iter­a­tion is still a work in progress and we are actively test­ing new advanced solu­tions to make this data more action­able (e.g. trend­ing aver­age key­word rank­ings, uti­liz­ing alerts to track top key­words, etc…). Stay tuned to this blog for an addi­tional post with more details on these advanced solutions.

Our hope is this new func­tion­al­ity will pro­vide our clients a deeper level of insight into their organic key­word opti­miza­tion efforts and can help bet­ter bal­ance their organic vs. paid search efforts, fur­ther opti­miz­ing ad spend.

Impor­tant Issues to Note:

1. For more infor­ma­tion on get­ting this report imple­mented, please reach out to your Account Manager
2. There is no guar­an­tee this rank­ing data will be per­ma­nently included by Google in their refer­rer strings. Our hope is that Google will con­tinue to pro­vide this use­ful infor­ma­tion, which could also help lessen the bur­den expended by auto­mated key­word rank­ing query tools on their data centers.
3. Google has not rolled this out com­pletely. The roll out is cur­rently lim­ited to the US-only and is cur­rently impact­ing only ~10% of searches
4. Ben Gaines will soon be post­ing more infor­ma­tion on the Omni­ture Blog regard­ing addi­tional “gotchas” and FAQs regard­ing this new solution.