Say you’re the busy owner of a website selling artichoke-flavored dog biscuits — Barkichoke Treats, let’s call them. You’ve got a product dogs love and a handsome website with the very latest e-commerce bells and whistles, all ready for business.
The problem: customers aren’t finding you online.
You go to Google or Bing and search for “vegetarian dog biscuits” and “artichoke puppy chow” and all you see in the results is the competition: Organic Tail-Waggers, Livaroons, and Aunt Judy’s All-Soy Snackies. Plus a lot of celebrity vegetarian dog foods lines from Tony Danza and Cher.
You know you need to do better or you’ll be out of business. But how to go about it?
Advanced Web Ranking to the rescue. Advanced Web Ranking is a powerful and efficient bit of software that shows you how you search engine ranking on various key words, across all major (and many minor) search engines, and then helps you make the changes you need to rise to the top.
Advanced Web Ranking is a desktop application — you start by downloading the basic software from advancedwebranking.com. That gives you the ease and power of running things from your desktop instead of from the web. We started by downloading a free 30-day trial that had all the full functionality we needed.
The heart of the application is simple: enter websites for yourself and the competition, enter “vegetarian dog biscuits” or whichever keywords you want to track searches for, and finally, pick the search engines for which you want to see results. (In our tests, Google, Bing, Yahoo and Alexa were automatically selected as the default search engines.) Then turn AWR loose to do its thing and help your website ranking.
You’ll get results like Current Rank (showing the position of your website against the competition for each search engine and keyword) and Top Sites (showing the position of each website as retrieved from various search engines, including the evolution of those positions over time). The AWR Overview function puts it all into one big report.
With that as your starting point, you can go as deep into the weeds as you like and as your bottom line demands. Advanced Web Ranking allows multiple projects so you can monitor various websites and keywords at one time. Keywords can be imported or added one by one, and it’s easy to get suggestions based on the keywords you already have. They have a great keyword research tool. You can also see how things are playing in different Google countries, and there’s a long list of long-tail search engines you can also work with. AWR now monitors Google maps results for first-page rankings, and as maps and hand-helds become ever bigger sources of searches and customers, this is crucial.
The look and feel of Advanced Web Ranking is slick and intuitive. It’s easy to enter keywords and search engines, and rather fun to see the system grinding through the updates for all of them. Advanced Web Ranking does an admirable job of keeping you updated about what’s happening at all times.
Advanced Web Ranking has three levels of service — Standard, Professional, and Enterprise — plus an extra Server level that allows multiple clients to connect remotely to the same database. Prices currently range from $99 (for Standard) to $599 (for Server). If you’re serious about your search engine ranking — and serious about selling those dog biscuits — it’s well worth the money.
Ranking: 8.5 stars out of 10
