It’s an all too common obsession… site owners are concerned with the concept of page rank and obtaining a “high” ranking. This is despite the fact that page rank and online marketing success are far from synonymous. This focus on page rank -- misbegotten though it may be – has give rise to a small industry of third party developers and search optimization consultants with special tools to analyze and boost "page rank".
Guess what. It’s not that complicated to measure page rank, and page rank is not the metric site owners should be most concerned with -- the proper tools can reveal a treasure trove of more valuable, actionable information.
(Google itself, via its official Webmasters Blog, says that the three most important site metrics to be concerned with are conversion rate; bounce rate and clickthrough rate (CTR).)
The first tool that web site owners and online marketers can use to check on page rank (called “average position") can turn to is Google’s webmaster tools. Webmaster tools, though similar to the Google Analytics interface, gives a “Google’s eye view" of a site -- raw, unrefined search data:
Here we see a screen shot from Webmaster tools. What’s not so is interesting is the “Average Position” column… It is the queries (grayed out in this sample), the number of impressions, the click through (CTR) information, and trendlines.
A particularly insightful and potentially invaluable bit of information to watch for would be queries with low impressions but high click-through rates: This would suggest that users are searching for your site in unexpected ways. This information can then be incorporated into future SEO efforts.
Two other tools for analyzing this information are available within the new Google Analytics interface which was released earlier in 2011.
This report available under the Traffic Sources/SEO Optimization/Queries selection of the new interface only (it is possible to switch back and forth between the two interfaces):
As with data supplied from the Webmaster tools report, the “Average Position” column is quite possibly the least valuable data on the report -- so don’t let this become a primary concern of yours. What’s more interesting is information on impressions and CTR -- this is data that can be used to more effectively target SEO and paid search efforts.
This report shows what keywords are on the mythical ‘first page’ of search results. But again, it’s not the page rank that’s so important -- the truly important information is the keywords and how they fit in with your existing SEO efforts.
For a further debunking of the idea of page rank, see Why PageRank Doesn’t Matter Anymore by Ana Hoffman.