Review Your Search Engine Rankings

There are many tools to choose from from Ahref or Semrush are some of the best. They offer much more in terms of tools and features fot paid user but the free versions are still very useful. You won't need to pay for any tools to perform this research, you can do it all for free.

First up is the Ahref traffic checker. This tool will show you your estimated website traffic based on your keyword rankings and their popularity.

It's important to note that these are just guidelines and are not exact numbers.

Next up is the backlink checker. This will show you a quick snapshot of what websites are linking to your domain and what words they use to link to you.

It won't show you all the backllinks but it will give you a count and most importantly a count of the do and don't follow links, which are very important.

The important thing when it comes to SEO tools for you will be to find something you like and can work with and is free. There shouldn't be any need for you to sign up for a paid account, as you won't use the features enough and they can be really expensive.

There is an important thing to consider when choosing a tool and that is not comparing values across two different tools. If you run out of free searches wait until the next day or you'll get some wacky data.

The traffic data is an estimate of the number of visitors to the website you are searching for. It is typically based on the keywords that website ranks for and the popularity of those keywords and gives an esitmate of how much organic web traffic you get.

That means it's not entirely accurate but it is a good guide to see how you are doing compared to your competitors. There are other ways to get traffic to your website that won't be included in this data which we will explore in other articles.

This one should be self explanitory, you want to note the organic traffic number and the trend over time.

This is where you can see the traffic breakdown by country and the top keywords that are driving traffic to the website. You can probably ignore the country data as most competitors will be in the same country as you. It would be worth noting though if a competitor has a lot of traffic from a country you don't - more traffic to a sight does help with rankings.

You want to know what what the position and volume is for the terms 'jiu jitsu near me' or 'bjj near me'. Additionally, as you search through your compeitors, you should look for keywords they have in their top five that you might be able to rank for.

In this example, 'kids jiu jitsu near me' is a keyword that might be targeting, if we offer kids classes - even though the volume is low.

• Position: This is where the website ranks for that keyword
• Volume: This is how many people search for that keyword per month, not how much traffic they get from it.

This section is great because it will show you what pages are driving the most traffic to your website. We cover this in more detail in our article on improving your online visibility.

The top pages here are areas you should be exploring or trying to compete on. It will show you where you and your competitors are getting signage to your website outside if your main homepage.

Backlinks are like social proof or word of mouth referrals. They are tools that search engines like to use to meassure how much authority they should give you.

There are two type 'nofollow' and 'dofollow' which can sometimes be called 'followme' links.

Nofollow are links to your site where the site referring you doesn't want to pass along its authority to you.

Followme links are the opposite, they are links that the site wants to pass along its authority to you.

You want a health mix of both.

Domain Rating (DR) is your authority score, the higher the better. This is sometimes referred to as Domain Authority (DA) and is a score out of 100.

Don't forget, when comparing this score - you should only compare the numbers from the same tool.

This is the score of 'how important this site is'. You should ignore sites site 'domains.' or 'seo list', these are geberic sites and aren't that useful to you.

You should look out for higher DR sites than your that might be able to link back to your site.

Think of this as the 'who', who is referring you. You can see from the example image that there is a bjjgymfinder.com with a higher DR than this site.

We should count this as a valuable page, we actually have a list of these directories and resources that you can post your site to, so you don't have to go hunting for them.

This is the 'where to' and the 'what for'. Search engines do look at the 'Anchor Text' to determine what the url is about. If you see a lot of 'here' or 'click here' then you should try to get that changed to something more relevant.

This will also guide you into what pages other people find most relevant about your site.

As we said previously, there are many tools to choose from, a tool we briefly mentioned was Semrush. You can set up a project (you're website) and add 10 competitors and 10 keywords to track.

If you wanted to monitor your progresses over time or have an e-mail update of when your rankings for those keywords change compared to your competitors, then you should use this tool.

Don't be scraed when you sign up, you can use it for free, just click skip past all the payment screens.

Grab a google sheet document, hit up Google with the 'bjj near me' to see where you rank and start gathering the data we've talked about.

Once you have a good idea of where you are and what you and your competitors rank for and the value (volume) of those searches, come back and explore the other articles we have on improving your online presence.