Don’t know? Doesn’t surprise me.

For awhile I didn’t know either. Sure I was keeping an eye on what I THOUGHT was my prime competitor. Only thing is before I started keeping track, I didn’t realize he was more or less drifting off into the sunset. Or, that there were two newer sites I should have been watching. Ooops.

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So yes, most of us have no clue if we’re winning the Google rankings battle much less the war. Yet I’ve discovered keeping score is so simple. Here’s all you need to do:

• Identify the Competition
• Track PageRank
• Ferret Out How Many Pages in Google
• Gauge Both Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
• Track Traffic
• Keep an Eye on Them

That’s it. That’s all that counts really. To start...

:: Identify Your Competitors
Not hard. Just identify the top 5 competitors in your niche that you want to outrank.

One way to do that, is to take the five or six keyword phrases you are looking to rank well for and see who is in the top 10 for each. Since anyone can rank well for one keyword, doing this for multiple keywords will spotlight those who show up repeatedly. This highlights them as the stiffer competition.

Then repeat this every three or four months to make sure no one new has slipped in under the radar.

:: Track PageRank (PR)
Once again take those same five or six "must-win" keywords you want to come out on top for.

Use the Google toolbar to track the PR of competitors’ pages optimized for those prime keywords.

Google Toolbar Tip: I realize some have no clue on how to coax Google’s tool bar to give up PageRank. So here’s all you do. Simply hold your cursor in the green bar area itself. Get it in just the right spot and a little pop up box will appear that says:

"PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of this page (4/10)"

In this example the PR is 4.

Note the target keywords and the PR for pages featuring them on a spreadsheet.

:: How Many Pages in Google?
Again pretty simple, if you use the tool at this site: Neutralize.com

In the left hand column you’ll see it asks "How well optimized is your website?"

Now I don’t give a rat’s behind about mine, necessarily, but I do care about those pesky competitors.

1. Enter the competitor’s URL.
2. Stick in a guess-timate for how many pages are on their site.
3. Hit the "check now" button.

The result will show you how many pages they’ve got in Google, FAST, altaVista, and Inktomi. While I track all of them - you should at least track the number of pages in Google.

:: Gauge Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Not all links are created equal in Google’s eyes. Links from High PR sites are worth more. So you want a read on both the quantity and quality of your prime competition’s inbound links.

Since it’s more inclusive, you may want to use FAST to find out the total number or quantity of inbound links.

Here’s how. Using FAST put:

link:www.competitor.com

in the search box. All pages linking to www.competitor.com will be returned.

You’ll see something like "1 - 10 of 135 Results for link:www.competitor.com" at the top of the page of FAST listings which would tell you there are 135 sites that link to that site.

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Google on the other hand will only reveal inbound links from sites with a PR 4, or higher. BAM! There’s your take on quality.

While you can do the same with Google as you did with FAST, Google makes it even easier.

Go to the advanced search page. Scroll down until you see a heading that says "Page-Specific Search". Stick www.competitor.com into the search box labeled: "Links       Find pages that link to the page". Click "Search".

At the top of the page of search results you’ll see a result summary line like the following:

"Searched for pages linking to www.competitor.com. Results 1 - 10 of about 21."

The above would indicate there 21 high quality links to your competitor. Subtract the internal links from pages within the web site in question to determine how many high quality sites actually link to your competitor.

Record the count of all links, plus high quality external links on your spreadsheet.

:: Track Traffic
Use either Alexa’s Toolbar or visit Alexa to grab traffic stats.

While far from perfect since it can be manipulated, you can still get a decent estimate of traffic as measured by users with the Alexa toolbar visiting the sites.

To keep it simple just track the Alexa traffic rank.

Then to close the loop...

:: Keep an Eye on Them
Use a page monitoring service like Change Detect to watch competitor sites like a hawk. This free service makes the process automatic and will email you whenever the site you're monitoring changes. It gives you another means of checking whether a competing webmaster is actively improving his site or asleep at the switch.

Okay, now the easiest way to recognize trends is to graph what’s going on. You’ll be able to see right away, if the trend is your friend or not.

If any competitor is getting more of anything, you’re going to have to match them or risk falling behind. Don’t be blindsided.

** Track your closest rivals.
** Compare your stats to theirs.
** Act or react accordingly.

It’s easy and doesn’t take more than 20-30 minutes a week with the methods provided above. Doing so gives you the marketing intelligence you need to improve your Google ranking, or at least, to hold your own no matter what your competitors are doing.

About The Author
How much is more traffic worth to your business? Take John Gergye’s Search Engine Quiz and get a special report "Coming Out On Top" with 49 tools that make it easy to get more traffic.

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