The aim of this post is to give you a gauge of the most important SEO metric for your website – your search engine rankings. Often, we find ourselves searching for our keywords on Google to see where we rank. That gives us a binary result – a ‘yes/no answer’ i.e. you’re either ranking well or not. But while performing this periodic ritual, we miss recording something more valuable. And what’s that?
Imagine you’re playing a game – and all your rankings in that game are put up on a scoreboard, next to your competition. The score-keeper runs some calculations on the rankings, and comes up with a total score for each contender. Those scores are then put up on a totem pole (a pole where ranks are put in order from top to bottom), so you know exactly who’s winning & who’s losing. You then track this score over-time to witness your improvement (or decline); and make changes to your SEO strategy when necessary. Such a score would arm you with precise knowledge of your competitive rankings & tell you where you stand on Google in one go, wouldn’t you agree?
That’s the concept behind RankScore, and that’s why I feel it is important to share it with you. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to determine your own RankScore (with the help of a simple Excel sheet), and know the RankScore of your competitors too. You ready? Let’s jump right into it then.
Step 1: List your Keywords
In the first step, simply list down all your keywords together (preferably in an excel sheet). In the next column, write down your website name/URL, and highlight the whole column.
Tip: the more keywords you enter, the more awesome analysis you’ll get
Step 2: Know your Competition
This is important! You need to know who you’re competing against. If you already know your top 3 competitors (atleast), skip this step. If you don’t, perform a search on Google for your main keyword, and note down the top 3 competitors. Now, enter them next to your website like this:
Step 3: Find thy Standing
Where do you rank on Google? More importantly, where does your competition rank? Let’s get searching! To do this, you can either use free tools available online that allow you to check your rank on Google, or do it manually yourself. What we’re trying to do here is fill in that sheet with actual data that can be used for our analysis in the next step. The final version may look something like this:
Step 4: Analyze
Done checking your rankings for all keywords? Great! It’s time for your hard-work to pay off! The first thing you should do is find out your average rankings. This will tell you the exact number of #1’s, Top 10s, Top 30s & Top 100s you have. The formula I use to calculate this is:
=COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10”)
The above formula will tell you the number of Top 10s that are present within a keyword cell range. To put this in your sheet, simply change the B3:B6 to your keyword cell range, and “<=10” to whatever criteria you want to apply (for eg: “=1” for to find the number of Position 1s).
Next, let’s run a formula to get the actual rankScore. For the sake of simplicity, here’s a formula you can use right away:
=(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “=1”)5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=3”)4)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10”)3.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=30”)2.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=50”)1.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=70”)1)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=100”)*0.5)
Put this formula below all your rankings and replace the “B3:B6” with the range of your keyword cells. This formula basically counts all your rankings, gives a specific score to each position range (for eg: 5 points if you are #1 for a keyword), and then sums it up for all keywords. There it is, your RankScore! This is how it all looks at my end:
PS: If you would prefer to download the Excel sheet I use in the example above, you can download it here (it’s in XLS format).
Step 5: Take Action!
Yep, about time! Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to think about your future steps & the action you’re going to take on them. If you have a lower score vis-à-vis your competition, change your SEO strategy. This blog is full of posts which can help you get on the right track and stay there! For more insight, compare your averages too (your number of #1s, Top 10s etc.). If you fare great on both these aspects, great job – be proud of yourself!
So that’s it, I hope you enjoyed reading this post. I would love to hear your feedback/likes/hates in the comments section below.
Excel in SEO with MS Excel! 🙂 Great post!
Nice tool. Its so easy to use. Now I don’t to rely on third part softwares to get full detailed report on SEO ranking. You have made my life so easy. Thanks.
Hi Bhavik, great post. Excel is just a must have when doing SEO research. 🙂
Hi Bhavik
Awesome Article thanks for share it. Like a well-established SEO company, Ebizsubmit doesn’t rely on offering services without consideration. Instead, it’s dedicated to create awareness concerning the effectiveness of Internet marketing. So I like you blog.
wow, its really wonderful lesson to learn about SEO Ranking. Most of webmaster’s were confused in ranking factor & still many webmaster’s are in confusion. This article can really help in Ranking.
Hi Bhavik
Thanks fro excellent post. I agree. Good, quality SEO doesn’t have to be overpriced, and for that matter not all overpriced SEO services are really as effective as they claim. It really comes down to results, doesn’t it? If you find someone that charges $50/hr vs someone that charges $1000/hr, you are not guaranteed to get better results from the latter. SEO is one field where there really is no rhyme or reason to prices, and for that matter it is overrun by scam-artists, unfortunately.
Oh. I thought SEO can be analysed by software like MajesticSEO only. Thanks for the readymade excel codes 🙂
never thought of these ways . seriously.. I just thought one could rely only on those softwares to get a report of SEO.. Awesome..
unique ways to check SEO Rank Score
Hi Bhavik,
Really interesting article and unique way to check the SEO Rank Score. I would love to try out this technique.
Awesome!! I even dont know we can use excel like that!! I’ll try it soon!!!
thanks for this highly informative article bahvik.., but i think this is very tedious job to be done.., but this is what a blogger needs to track his success.
You’re welcome Rohit. It’s tedious, but there are many tools that can help you automate the whole process. One of them is mentioned in my post, the other one in my bio above.
I am bad at Excel… gonna download your Excel sheet to make it easier for me. Hopefully it’s easy to use. 🙂
It is. Let me know how it works out for you! 🙂
This post is just “wooowwww” ! ! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Superb explanation Bhavik! 🙂
Thanks Zailnil for this wow response. Appreciate it!
Hi bhavik,
awesome post and well explained
Thanks Raj. Happy you found this useful.
Hi Bhavik,
Thanks for sharing the post . Will be sure to have a look at “whereStand.com”.
Thanks Anton. Do let me know if you get stuck somewhere.
Thanks for the SEO rank score tool. Yes this is a practical approach to rank blog. These things are old but very useful. I am very happy to see this tool.
Thanks hrmehrotra!
nice post bhavik……..you explained how to analyze keywords competition
Thanks a well explained post Bhavik, Just visited your wherestand website, its also very useful to check our ranking.
Glad you found it helpful. 🙂
Wow, I never used Excel before for SEO purpose.
Thanks for sharing the resourceful information.
Glad you found this helpful Arsh!
Thanks David, hanakres & admin!
Hey Bhavik, this is a very useful post. Infact, this is something all bloggers need, at the end of a month or a quarter, everyone wants to see where they stand in the market. And yes initially it was tedious to get the rankings which too weren’t appropriate, the scorecard you mentioned is amazing. Thanks for sharing the post.
You’re welcome Henry & I’m happy this was useful to you. Yes, the scorecard when tracked over a period of time would give you some awesome intelligence on your rankings. We’ll soon have the tracking feature implemented in our tool too, so do check it out!
Hey Bhavik thanks for this. Very detailed.
Of course, this strategy will be very helpful for bloggers and online businesses.
Its a great need of every blogger or entrepreneur to get high rank in search engines. So these are seems to be useful and effective strategies to work on them to get search engine rankings.
Yah David. It’s a great need. Bhabik, I like you post, showed an another important use of excel. I’ll try it to find seo score.