On the Floor

I was chatting with a client yesterday and I was telling him about a script I'd written that returns your ranking in Google search engine results for various keywords.  Just give it a domain name and a list of keywords and the script takes care of the rest.

For example, if you're the first result in Google for a keyword, the script will return 1.  If you're the fifth result on the second page, the script will return 15 (there are ten results on each page of results on Google by default - the script also ignores entries for Google maps and paid search results, this is purely about organic search).

My client was intrigued, because he's investing a lot of money in SEO currently.  I told him I'd help him out.

I started work on the project last night.  Few things are as satisfying as the rapid development of useful web tools, and that's especially true when you can leverage the strengths of a great programming language (Ruby).  I chose the minimal and elegant web framework Sinatra for handling the web side of things, along with Datamapper and SQLite for data storage.

I dubbed it Clamber, because it's not easy climbing in search engine rankings.  Brian Potstra whipped up a quick design and we had the app on our server at noon today.  I sent my client a link.  His response: "It’s a great tool - we’re always wondering if our efforts and spend is having any benefit and this helps quantify things for sure."

We'll be adding more features to the app in the days ahead and may provide access to the tool to our clients once it's a bit more polished.  In the meantime, however, if you're curious how you rank in search engine results for various keywords, feel free to contact me and I'll send you a CSV.

Here's how:

1. Visit our contact form.

2. Enter your name and email address.

3. Begin your message with: "Attention Adrian - re. Clamber" or something similar.

4. Provide the domain for which you wish to see rankings, and at least 10 keywords that you're trying to rank for, separated by line breaks (feel free to send me up to 100 keywords).  Note that the app does not retrieve results past the fifth page of results (rank 50) so please don't send in keywords for which you have no chance of ranking.

E.g:

Attention Adrian - re. Clamber

Domain: google.ca

Keywords:

search
search engine
local search