Here’s a novel idea – rankingCoach – an automated online coaching system that leads you through the various tasks required to put you up at the top of the Google SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages.

Yes, they do write the name rankingCoach with a lower case “r” despite it being the first letter of the word and the fact that it is a proper noun. Here’s what the Oxford English has to say about that:

They probably think that is novel and exciting but it really isn’t – eBay have been doing it for years.

Anyway, that’s the end of the grammar lesson, back to rankingCoach the product. What does it do?

Well, the idea is that you interact with the online auditing system and it suggests things that you can do in order to improve your site’s optimisation and get a better rank on Google and, presumably, other search engines too. From what I’ve seen the process could certainly improve the situation if the website was initially built by monkees and the content is fairly naff – you know, poor grammar, incorrect capitalisation etc. A lot of emphasis is given to the need to obtain citations from various directories and other online citation sources (Yelp etc), and I certainly don’t disagree with that, you should do it – or better still, get someone else to do it. If it is done properly the likes of MOZ and Majestic will notice it and it should improve your Citation Flow metric, which may help your Google PageRank, or then again, perhaps it won’t. No one knows for sure.

The optimisation process appears to take into account everything necessary to get a website on track to improve in the rankings. Keyword research, on page optimisation, structural or “technical” SEO and link building are all mentioned as being covered. The all-important aspect of optimisation that so many people ignore – competitive analysis – appears to have been incorporated into the product as well.

It is certainly a great idea and I’m sure that many small businesses could benefit from it – if they could be bothered to do it themselves rather than just pay an SEO specialist to do it for them. I’m sure that many will enjoy learning the processes involved and the joy of watching their website climb the rankings over time.

I’m not at all against the idea behind rankingCoach, I just think it unlikely that it will have much effect on a site’s overall search engine ranking unless it was in a real old mess to begin with – if the site to be optimised is actually set up properly with all the relevant meta tags etc set up, and if it has good content but still doesn’t rank very well, then the solution to the problem is likely to be much more complex. It is at times like this that we have to start straying from the simple fixes and look at how a website can be helped with more “Grey Hat” methods and I see no mention of those on the rankingCoach site.

Pricewise it all seems fairly reasonable with a single site plan starting at £24.95/month for a single project, i.e. 1 website, with additional projects priced at £19.95/month each. If you get your skates on and get the work done quickly you should only need to subscribe for a few months – the optimisation process will largely be a matter of “rinse and repeat” after that. These prices are excluding VAT.

There’s a free trial available for rankingCoach so maybe you should consider giving that a try first. Remember, it can take months to see results from some SEO work so don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get the top spot overnight.

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