Ranking Reports, Grading Reports, Website Assessment, FirmSite Analysis
Be weary of the online reporting tools... be very weary!
Ranking Reports
First, it helps to understand what a ranking report really is. While it is often touted as a means of identifying the true position of a website relative to other websites in the search engine results, it is flawed - and not just a little, but seriously flawed.
Ranking reports are typically created with tools, such as WebPosition Gold, Rank This, or Grading Reports. Those tools test search engine results for keywords supplied by the human end user. First flaw - The test are a snapshot of the search engine results at that moment in time, but results change based on many factors including publication of new content on your or other websites.
Second flaw - humans supply the terms upon which the test is conducted. If the person supplying the terms is an expert in search engine marketing, they may also have a good grasp of the top search terms used for your website's industry; however, those terms change, and search terms are more unique than they are differentiated. For example, a website with 1,000 unique visitors per month can look to their analytics reporting tool (the software used to measure traffic to the site) and see that some 800 different key phrases were used to find the site. Some may be similar, but most produce different results. A single criterion therefore cannot answer the question, "how does my site rank?" The true questions is, "how does my site rank for this term?" And the reality is that the term provided may not have been used by any searcher within the last 6 months.
Grading Reports
Next, we have the grading software. Those ask an end user to provide a URL (the address of the website), a set of key words or phrases, and from that information proceed to grade the website. Again, the key term causes a serious human error in the analysis as noted above. It also uses a set of rules to determine an outcome, which rules may or may not have an effect on the site's placement in the search engine rankings, the website's ability to be found, or off site or back end tools that remain invisible to the testing program.
Grading software also omits certain factors that need to be included, or includes factors that often excluded. Those factors often fail to affect the site's ability to leverage itself in the rankings. For example, a legal disclaimer is often verbosely written with legalese, yet few search for the disclaimer unless they are another website builder wanting to know what they should say. However, the 14th grade level of those terms affect the software's results; meanwhile, they do not affect the website's ranking.
Ask Questions
Most of our clients are lawyers, and the single most important ability of a lawyer - the thing that will set apart the men from the boys and the women from the girls, so to speak - is the lawyer's mental capability to dig for the truth. If you are presented with a ranking report, a grading report, or any other form of software-based report, ask questions - ask lots of questions.
What factors were used to determine the testing procedure? Who determined those factors? What exactly does this test measure? No, I mean "exactly, what is it measuring"? Who and what is being compared? And how do you know that what it compares is important, or if it will even have an effect on my income?
Then turn to your computer, bring up Google, and begin search queries. Use the terms that your clients use when they walk into your office for a FIRST visit. If your site is not ranking well for those terms when you search, it is not ranking well for those terms when your prospective client searches. If you don't get to present, you can't be considered for hire.
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