How to compare the search engine rank of your blog with your competitor
Search Engine Ranking of a website determine how much a site is respected by search engines. Learn how to figure out your sites search engine ranking and how to compare your site rank with your competitor site's rank.
Most websites receive majority of their traffic from search engines. Search engines determine which sites to show in the search results based on a large number of signals including the search engine ranking of the websites.
In this article, I will discuss how to determine the search engine rank of your website compared with your competitor websites.What is search engine ranking?
Search Engine Ranking is the internal rank assigned by a search engines to the websites. This is a confidential rank and is not published. Webmasters have no way to figure out what is the rank of their websites. Each search engine will have different ranking system and the ranking by different search engines may be significantly different.
In addition, the search engine ranking is not static. They keep changing dynamically based on a number of factors which are not disclosed by them.
To make it further complex, the search engine ranking is not a single number. Instead, each site will have a number of ranks for each niche and even various keywords. For example, this site may rank high for the technology category but may not do well for entertainment niche.
Compare search engine ranking of your website with your competitor websites
There is no definite way to find the search engine rank of your website since it is not a static or fixed number. Instead, what you can do is, run some small experiments to find how your rank compared to other sites.
Here are 2 experiments to figure our how your site ranks compared to your competitor sites:
1. Look at the most recent article published in your competitor site. Quickly post a similar article on your site on a similar topic. Copy and paste 1 single line of text from the other site to your article and publish it.
2. Publish another article in your website with exact same title as your competitor site but different content. Your article should be almost same length and should deal with same topic.
In order to make these tests more accurate and reliable measure of the search engine ranking, the articles in your site should be on same topic and same length compared to the article on the other site you are comparing the rank with. Also, you should post the article as quickly as possible after the other article is published in the other site. This is because search engines like Google give higher priority for newer content and you should avoid the benefit of new content for your article.
Wait for a day and then search for the title and the copied line of text. See which site is shown first in Google or other search engines.
If your site is shown before your competitor site, that indicates your site is ranking better than your competitor site. I have mentioned 2 different tests and if your site is ranking higher for both the tests, that is a strong indication that your site is ranking much better than your competitor site.
You may want to wait couple of days and keep checking in the search results to see if the rank change later. Since your posts are newer than the other article you are comparing with, you may have some advantage for first few days after it is published. So, keep checking and if your sites continue to rank better after 4-5 days, you are doing great!
Don't forget to remove the copied text after you are done with the test.
I have done the above tests when this site was originally known as MyWindowsClub.com and I found we rank very well for the articles related to various tech topics compared to our competitor sites. I am not sure what is the impact on our search engine ranking after we moved to a new domain. The traffic stats indicate we have some pretty bad impact on SEO and we hope to gain back our traffic rank soon. (UPDATE: This article was actually a test to measure our rank compared to another site after we moved to new domain. And we found we perform really low after the domain change! Some how Google hasn't given us the same ranking we had earlier with our old domain. I learnt a lot from this experience and I have shared some best practices for moving to a new domain.)
Did you run the above tests and found out how your site is ranking? Share your experience as a response below.
Remember, Google does not recommend you spending a lot of your valuable time trying to figure out your search engine rank factor. Listen to this video from Matt Cutts!