Shooting a quick video review for a company called CuteRank over on cuterank.net.
The link should be on this website or under description, maybe both.
Basically I just want to give you a quick heads up about how I discovered this company and why I use it.
Basically, I do a lot of SEO for myself and for my clients. I used to check the rankings manually, so I used to log onto Google Chrome and go and check them out and see where I am, page one, two, three, wherever and it was taking up a lot of time.
Also, when you click on a website, they tend to personalize the results to what you’ve previously clicked on, which therefore doesn’t give you a true reflection of where your website is actually ranking. So this became a bit of a problem for me.
Then what I used to do was load up another browser, for example Firefox or Internet Explorer, and it gave me a better reflection of where the sites were truly ranking. But the problem that I then had was I forgot I’m not meant to be clicking on the rankings because then Google would then personalize those keywords that I’ve Googled to show the results that I’ve previously clicked on. I hope that makes sense.
This was causing a bit of a pain for me and I looked into automatically checking rankings previously. And to tell you, I wasn’t too impressed with what was on the market. I found some software and it didn’t really do it for me.
Then I stumbled across CuteRank and they had a free trial. So I thought, “Why not? Let’s give it a go.” To my surprise it was actually quite good, because obviously I tried other ones and wasn’t impressed.
I didn’t think there was anything out there that was going to help me. So when I tried these guys out with the trial and when it actually worked quite well, I was a little bit taken aback. I found myself using the software that they have on a very regular basis, in fact on a daily basis. And in fact, many times every day, because your rankings can fluctuate and it’s interesting to see where they are.
So what I was doing was adding on a new profile. You’re only allowed to add one profile on the free version. So I’d add on a profile, check out the rankings. Then I’d remove the profile, add on another profile for a different website and then that was taking up a bit too much time.
So I thought, “Well, let’s upgrade to the professional edition,” which is what I did. And now I can check on rankings for as many websites as I want.
I should just note here that it’s a very timesaving software in the sense that it pulls in, automatically, the meta keywords from your home pages. So it can detect those and, assuming they’re the ones that you want to rank for , it adds it to the software and then you just click “gather report” or whatever the button. And literally within a few seconds it tells you where your website is for those specific keywords.
As you can imagine, I’m very, very pleased to have discovered this software and I thoroughly recommend it because it’s just a massive time saver. The reports that they generate are very, very good. They’re not 100% accurate.
Now, let me just clarify this. I’m not saying they’re inaccurate, but they’re not 100% accurate. For example, it may say that your website is ranking in position eight for a specific keyword and it turns out to be position nine. So that could happen, I think, because of some kind of DNS issues, whether it’s some kind of data center or something. It might update it in one part of the world but not another. I remember seeing a Google webmaster tool video on that.
But on the whole, for the majority of the keywords, it’s very, very accurate, even if there’s a slight disparity, maybe one or two places, it’s nothing serious to get concerned about because at least you know what page you’re on and that counts for quite a lot.
So the only other downside, I think, is really that if you want to run or check your rankings for multiple websites at one time, Google may temporarily block you, if you like, from getting any more rankings data, because it doesn’t like you gathering all this information excessively.
So what I tend to do is I check three or four different websites at once and then I leave it half an hour, an hour and then I check a few other ones. They do have a proxy feature on CuteRank, which I imagine is some kind of way around this, but I haven’t really had the time to check it out. So that might be something you wish to do.
There’s no real need for it for myself because I just check this website, that website, another website. That’s me doing pretty good.
What else? I think the thing is what I like about it is it color codes the rankings. So if you’re in the top 10 SERPS, I think it’s green. Then it’s an orange or something if you’re in the top 30. And if you’re outside that, it’s a different shade of color as well.
It’s pretty cool when you see that on the screen. These things are fantastic, you can take a screen shot of it and send it to your clients. It’s just a very easy way to keep them informed as well.
So all around I was thinking about giving CuteRank about a nine out of ten, but there’s a couple of flaws in it that we’ve spoken about. So I was going to give it an eight, but then I thought it was too good to give it that. So I’m going to go with eight and a half out of ten. I think CuteRank, eight and a half out of ten. Thoroughly recommend them.
And if you want to monitor your rankings so you have it performing over a period of time, I’d definitely recommend. So if you start with the free version and then if you want to monitor multiple websites you can upgrade to the professional edition.
The link, as I say, should be on this video or in the description below. Feel free to check it out.
This is Sam King. Bye for now.
