When monitoring your own site and the sites you build for clients, it's important to make sure you receive automated reports to help highlight how your sites are responding to various keywords. Exact Factor is a free web based service that will help you do this and here's a brief overview of what you can use them for.

How do I get started?

Firstly, you'll need to sign up for an account with Exact Factor. This is free to sign up to and the services I'm referring to are free although as part of the sign up process they do try and get you to subscribe to a service called "SEO & GO" which isn't free but I didn't take up this option. Once you have registered and added your domain details, you will be presented with a dashboard that shows things like a message board containing statistics on your keyword results and details of your most promoted keywords:

There is also a keywords section that allows you to enter a list of keywords and key phrases that you want to monitor. You can set up to 3 search engines that you want to check your rankings in and these statistics will be automatically updated on a weekly basis:

As you can see from above, the current ranking is shown for each phrase and in brackets next to the value is the change that has been made since the last time that statistics were gathered.

Automated Reporting

As for the automated reporting that we wanted, there is an an "alerts" section that allows us to receive an email whenever a certain action happens. There are two types of alerts that the system will let you generate:

1. Top 10 Alert

A top 10 alert will let you set up an email alert for whenever one of your chosen keywords or phrases hits a certain spot in the search engine rankings e.g you can set up an alert to email you when a phrase enters the top 30 positions:




2. Competitor Alert

A competitor alert will allow you to set up an email alert for whenever one of your keywords or phrases overtakes one of your 5 pre-determined competitors:




This is a simple but really effective way of monitoring your sites progress and can help make sure you are promoting your sites to best effect.

Mark Smith
MDS Solutions - Darlington Web Design