Whether you’re a professional SEO managing 40 or 50 websites, or you’re a one-man operation with a couple of your own sites, you still need to track your search engine positioning. Are you moving up or down on the SERPS? How many keywords do you hold a page 1 placement for? Does MSN love your site, but Google hates it?

And, if you’re doing any kind of link building campaign (which you definitely should be), how do you know what’s working and what’s not? Sure, if you only have a couple of sites of your own you might be tempted to let the Google Gods do what they will with your site. But, if you’re trying to run a business, you need to treat your website like a business - and that means tracking your rankings!

How to Track Results

You can do it manually with a trusty Excel spreadsheet, a few hundred hours (ok, so I exagerated), and sheer will and determination. But why?

Just to give you an idea of one of my old manual ranking reports, here’s a screenshot of the whole grueling mess:

I had to go to each search engine, type in the keyword, sift through several pages of results to find the website. Then record my findings on the Word doc and show the amount of change either up or down from the last report. Do that for 3 search engines times 50 to 100 keywords, and you’ve got yourself a all day project!

Of course, back in the olden days of AltaVista, HotBot, AlltheWeb, and Lycos, there were more than just three engines, so it would take forever.

Automated Search Engine Ranking Reports

So like all evolved creatures, I found a better way. iBusinessPromoter (IBP) is a software program designed to automatically handle all aspects of SEO for you, but the one feature I want to focus on today is the ranking report.

All you have to do is input the domains you want to check (you can even put your competitor’s domains to do a comparison), add your keywords, choose the search engines you want rankings for, choose how deep in the search results you want to go, and hit "Go". It runs in the background without chewing up all your system resources.

The thing I like about it the most is the ability to choose international search engines. No matter where you or your client’s site is located, you can check ranking results for Google in the UK, Australia, and about 20 other countries, as well as Yahoo, MSN, Dogpile, and more.

When its done, it will tell you so (a voice actually comes over the speakers and tells you its finished.) And you have a completely customizable report that can be exported or saved in text, html, csv, or PDF (my personal favorite). Clients love a pretty PDF report!

You can put your own name, logo, and cover page if you own the Business version. I am always getting compliments on these reports from clients.

So now when I write some new content or do some linking focused on a particular keyword, I can see how effective the marketing actually was. Personally, I don’t know why anyone would do it the old fashioned way again.

You can get a free limited copy of IBP . Try it out! Tell me what you think. If you use different software to create ranking reports, share it with us.