I have a new website and I was curious if there is a way to find out on what position is the website when somebody searches for an expression in Google.
If I perform the search manually, I can find sometimes my website address showing up on 19-th page for some keywords.
It is quite tedious to navigate through all the pages to see if the website appears at all in the results.
Is there an automated way to tell me this info? My intention is to check if there are any changes in position over time.
The easiest solution is to use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). It will let you track the position of your site (or, more precisely, of the pages in your site) over a period, without you having to manually search each time.
But be aware that there is really no such thing as the position of a page in the search results. The position will vary from from minute to minute, and will also depend on who is doing the search, where they are located, what device they are using, and several other factors. GWT will give you the average position across all searches, but it doesn’t mean that any given searcher will see the page at that position.
You don’t enter a search expression into GWT. What the tool does is to show you the ranking for the searches that users actually perform. To see these, select Search Traffic / Search Queries / Top Queries from the dashboard.
If you are optimising for a certain search expression, and you don’t see that expression in GWT, it means that nobody has used that expression to find your page during the relevant period.
I wrote a php script to do this but its probably not what you want. Even if you use a cookie-less browser and search thru an anonymising web proxy you can still get varying results. For instance while investigating someone’s site I found the results were very different for Google Australia and Google UK.
Can I access that script somewhere on the net? It would be interesting to see how to query a search engine from php as well. If you don’t mind it sending it to me, I’d be very happy.
That’s not because your site is new, but because you have only recently registered for GWT. The tool won’t show any search results at all for a newly registered site, as it takes a few days, or a week or two, for it to collect enough data to show.
But you’re right about using the time to build more content. That’s always a good thing to do.