This compares to 21% (on Bing) and 28% (on Google) paying attention to right-side pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

View the full eMarketer article.

Depending upon your website’s current rank, your approach to your SEO efforts will differ.

If you don’t rank at all (or so far down the list of search results that no one will ever find your website) then you have a lot of work ahead of you to build credibility that your website is more relevant than all of those ahead of you.

If you rank well already then your job is to stay there. This including keeping an eye on your competitors and understanding if they are doing things that will cause their website to be seen as more relevant than your own.

How do you find out where your website ranks?

First, you have to determine which search phrases you want to focus on. There is an infinite number of possibilities of search phrases your customers may be using to find you in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. Search phrase research (also known as keyword research) is out of the scope of this SEO Tip, but we’ll talk about it in a future SEO Tip.

You could just start typing search phrases you think your customers are using into Google and then look at each result to see if it is your website. You might magically find your website in the results, but what if you are in position 172? It would take quite a while to get through 17+ pages of results before you found your own website.

Then you have to do the same thing for every other search phrase you think is relevant (and who knows if the search phrases you’re selecting are ones people are actually searching for). And then you have to do the same thing in all the major search engines.

Wow, that’s a lot of work. Just to find out how your rank today. At this very minute. Which will change tomorrow due to many factors.

Essio Studio Automates Website Rank Checking

So how in the world do you keep track of where your website ranks – not just today but over time?

We’ve designed Essio Studio (our SEO Software) to do a lot of the time consuming tasks that people used to do by hand. An example of this is the automatic checking of your website’s rank in major search engines every single day. Then we put this data on a graph so you can immediately view trends.

You can try Essio Studio free for 30 days or try our free plan to get your feet wet. We don’t even ask for a credit card until you decide to subscribe. Questions? Contact us at support@essiostudio.com.