Doing SEO on your photography website without tracking results is like joining a gym to lose weight and not weighing yourself or getting your measurements when you start.  Sure, you may be improving but you don’t know by how much or how fast.

I track my own sites compulsively.  Many readers of this SEO blog have seen those spreadsheets and for many, that’s why you came here and follow me now.  Here’s one I was doing for BestDayPhoto.com for awhile (needs updating – I’m now page 1 for many of these searches including the first one.)

So how can you track your results?  The simplest way is like I have done above.   Go to Google Documents (or open Excel) and Create New > Spreadsheet.  List your keywords as I’ve done, the date for each “checkup” and get to work.  I use SerpRush to find out what page I’m on and then go find the actual number from there.  You can use anything from my What Page of Search Am I On post.  Page 1 is 1-10, Page 2 is 11-20, etc.   If you’re 3rd to last on Page 2, you’re 18th.

Don’t want to track your own?  It’s 2011 so of course it’s possible to have someone else doing this for you.  You can sign up for sites like EasySEOTracking or one of these Serp tools.

So why do I track my own on my sites?  Well, two reasons.  If someone is consistently outranking me, I want to know who they are so I can examine how they’ve done it.  This is how I learn.  Also, I like to see how my site displays under different searches.  Doing it automatically means you just get a list of results.  That’s great but not enough info for me.

Coming soon however, I’ll be using a program to track client rankings and show you exactly what’s going on.  I CAN’T WAIT.

(Doing research for this blog post, I found some tools that are amazing.  Sometimes “teaching” is the best way to learn.)