Table of Contents
When launching Advanced Web Ranking for the first time, its features, settings and possibilities may seem a little intricate. That is why we have created this tutorial, an intuitive, concise but, nevertheless, comprehensive manual which is intended to ease you in, to help you quickly get started on monitoring your website rankings in one or multiple search engines, according to your preferences. As an user, you will be given a wide range of possibilities, as AWR can easily be adjusted to your particular needs, without its precision and transparency being affected.
1. Creating an Advanced Web Ranking New Project
When you install Advanced Web Ranking for the first time, you can open the New Project Wizard by clicking on [Create New Project] in the Welcome dialog.
Now let's create a new project. You have several ways to do this. Go to [Project] -> [New project], use the "Ctrl+N" combination or select [New Project] from the top-right corner menu. Either way, the [New Project Wizard] will pop up.
Initially, you are required to enter the name of your website. You will type in, for example, "www.news.com" as being your website for this project.
Next, you will be provided with some keyword suggestions extracted from your website's title, but you can add your own, just by typing them in the form, one by row. These will be the keywords which you will check your rankings for, later in your project.
By default, the projects have set the search engines list the search engines used in the last opened project, but you can edit it and add others, if you click on the [Change...] button from the right side of the window.
Click [Finish] and the new project is created.
2. Updating the Project
 | You can update your current project by clicking on the "Update" button from the left side menu or by using the small arrow button next to your project, in the Project Manager window. In the "Update Progress" tab from the left side menu, you can follow the update's progress, manage it and view the history of all your updates. |
3. Checking your URL rankings
Now you can finally check your website's position in the search engines. Select the "Rankings" tab from the left side menu and choose one of the interactive reports available.
The "Website Rankings" report shows you the rankings you and your competitors have for a certain keyword, in three different ways: compared between two different update dates, compared between multiple update dates or the overall evolution of your rankings in time.
If you wish to view the rankings of a specific website for all the keywords it is optimized for, just switch to the "Keyword Rankings" report and view all this detailed data.
To see the rankings your websites have on all the search engines you have in your project, you must use the "Search Engine Rankings" interactive report and select the websites you wish to check the rankings for.
For all the interactive reports, the evolution in time chart has nothing to show yet except for a big dot right in the middle of the page, as we have only one day's data gathered and at least two days are necessary to render a meaningful graph.
4. Monitoring your competition
The Top Sites tab will show you the top ranking Websites for the selected keyword/search engine combination. Here you can see which websites are your closest competitors.
Since your site occupies the first place in the list, let's pick two other websites and add them to the URL list. Right-clicking (Option+Click on Mac) on an URL and selecting [Add Website] in the context menu will do just that.
From the "Project" menu, you can also color-code the Websites according to your preferences.
Now, you added the competition's Websites in your project (they appear in the Websites panel), but you have no data gathered for them. So update the project using the "Start update" button from the left side menu.
You can see now the rank evolution of both yours and your competitors' sites on the chart views and reports.
5. Sync your Google Analytics accounts
You can also synchronize your Google Analytics accounts with Advanced Web Ranking to have at hand all your analytics data. Further on, you will be able to see this data in the related analytics reports, or compare it with your website` s rankings and links.
To retrieve analytics data, click on the Analytics menu and enter your Google Analytics credentials. Then press the Connect to Google Analytics button and match your website to the related analytics account. Now just click the button and the fresh analytics data will be gathered in no time.
The first interactive report, the Dashboard, provides you with a summary of your website's analytics data: Website visits, Page views, Page views/visit, Avg. time on site, New visits and Bounce rate. You can also visualize each of them as a chart by switching from one grid to another, or you can check the panels at the bottom of the window to see the number of visits displayed by Keywords, Search engines or Referrals.
If you wish to view your analytics data detailed for each keyword, search engine or referrals from your Google Analytics account, you need to choose one of the other interactive reports available: Keywords, Search Engines or Referrals. These allow you to see the number of Visits, Page views, Page views/visit, Avg. time on site, New visits and Bounce rate for each item, both as a chart and table of values.
For cross segmenting your analytics you have available two interactive reports: Keyword by Search Engines and Search Engine by Keywords. These allow you to view for each keyword already added to your AWR project the traffic that came from different search engines or the opposite, the traffic that came from a search engine for different keywords.
As in your Google Analytics dashboard, you are able to track the goals you've created for your website. The Goals interactive report allows you to analyze the rate of Completions, number of Visits, Starts, the Conversion Rate, Abandonment Rate and the Abandoned Funnels for each of your created goals. You can also choose the view you prefer, chart or table of values.
6. Gather links
The next step is to check yours and your competitors link profiles. Go to the "Links" menu and select the desired number of links, anchor texts and website metrics you want to retrieve with Advanced Web Ranking. Then just press the Get SEOmoz links now button. Note the application will gather the link information you need from SEOmoz, consuming the related link credits.
Once the links update is finished, go to the Links menu and choose the desired interactive report. You can use the Overview report to compare your project's websites, side by side, per the link metrics retrieved:
You can also compare your website's links with those of your competitors to discover common referrers. For this you need to use the second interactive report from the Links menu, "Hub Sites" and select your project's websites you wish to compare links for.
If you wish to see detailed link information for your project's websites, you can use the "Top Backlinks" interactive report, which breaks down for you the list of top links for your websites, with accurate metrics, domain wide or for each URL pointing back to your website.
For the anchor text distribution of your link profile, you must use the "Anchor text distribution" interactive report, which gives you accurate information about the selected website's top anchor texts. You can view detailed anchor text metrics only for the linking root domains or for each URL linking to the selected website.
Easy enough? Try the Basic Tutorial to learn how to deal with more complex projects!