It’s still important to track keyword rankings if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.
Keyword ranking tracking can help you ensure your website is visible, using valuable search engine real estate, and driving increased traffic, sales, conversions and revenue.
With the right tools, platforms and processes in place, you can monitor how well your website is performing, helping you create an effective keyword research strategy that produces results over time.
You can also assess how your website responds to changes in your SEO strategy to help boost traffic to your website and meet key performance indicators.
What Is Rank Tracking?
Site tracking is still an important part of any successful SEO strategy and a key metric that most SEO pros, website owners and marketers continue to measure.
It allows you to measure how effective your optimization efforts have been once your keywords start ranking and delivering traffic, revenue and conversions over time, which is the goal of SEO.
Why Rank Tracking Is Important For SEO
If you have keywords that are at the top of Google that do not provide any business value, then your SEO efforts have been wasted.
By regularly tracking keyword rankings and analyzing trends over time, you’ll gain valuable insight into how effective your overall SEO strategy is at driving organic traffic to your website – and potentially driving conversions and sales.
This can be used to identify areas of opportunity for improving visibility and helping more people find what you have to offer.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools and platforms available that make it easy to check where your keywords are.
But here’s how to do it the right way based on my experience and some tips on how to track sites effectively.
How To Track Ranking With Keyword Groups
First, decide which keywords you want to track using your SEO platform or point solution.
You can also track keywords manually by just searching for the keyword in Google, but that is not a sustainable long-term solution.
I always recommend creating different keyword groups based on your website hierarchy and breaking it out between branded and non-branded keywords.
Brand terms provide a large amount of traffic and conversions for most websites, and losing rankings for a brand can have a detrimental effect on your bottom line, which makes tracking brand keywords important.
If I were managing SEO for Mrs Fields cookies and tracking keyword rankings, I would break down my keyword groups by top navigation, ie:
Screenshot of Mrs. Fields, December 2022
Since there are many products, we will split product listings into their own keyword group as well.
Also, I recommend adding a golden keyword list. These are keywords that your organization considers particularly important, that provide a lot of business value, and that are valuable to stakeholders.
Mobile And Desktop
With Google’s move to mobile-first indexing and different search results on mobile and desktop, it’s a good strategy to track both mobile and desktop sites. This is especially true because there are many factors at play, for example, personalization, speed, mobile friendliness, etc.
Tracking keywords on mobile and desktop can be expensive and take up extra bandwidth.
So, if you’re using a point solution or SEO platform that doesn’t offer unlimited keyword positions, you may quickly hit your keyword limit – especially if you’re managing a brand with thousands or up to age of millions of keywords.
Monitoring Competitor Rankings
Nothing fires up an executive more than showing them that your competition is driving more traffic from keywords that your company needs to own on the first page of Google.
Always monitor your competitors’ sites to see where they are getting traffic from, and what new keywords are driving traffic to their sites.
This allows you to see what opportunities you can easily win through net new content, existing optimization, linking, etc.
Monitoring where your competitors rank for certain keywords will give you a good idea of how well you’re doing in comparison, and what content you might need.
It may also inform your strategy when looking at how to improve your page rankings in the future.
Paying attention to competitors’ posts on non-brand; this is a good indicator of where good content will get your brand too.
Ranking Distribution
Paying attention to your ranking allows you to focus on quick wins – for example, high-flying opportunities (keywords ranking from positions 11 to 20) where small changes can potentially have a significant impact and drive more incremental traffic , revenue and adjustments.
Paying attention to keywords that are in traffic driving positions (ie, positions 4 to 10) and emerging positions (21 to 40) can also help you track performance and opportunities to drive increased visibility.
Screenshot by the author, December 2022
Regional And Local Tracking
If you are a regional or local business, it is important to keep an eye on how your website is performing in different geographical regions.
This will help you assess how well your local and regional SEO efforts are working, depending on where most of your target audience is located.
Additionally, be sure to track how keywords are trending over time, and how they are affected by algorithm updates, website updates, or other external factors.
Rank Tracking Tools You Can Use
There are many third-party rank tracking tools, point solutions, and platforms that you can use to track rankings, for example, Traject Data, Semrush, Ahrefs, BrightEdge, or Conductor, to name a few.
These tools allow you to enter any URL along with the keyword you want to check, and then give you an overview of how well that page is doing for that term.
They also offer insight into things like competition level, so you can get an idea of how difficult it would be to move up in rankings.
An effective way to track rankings is through automated reports, so you know how well your website is doing on a regular basis.
If you’re an e-commerce brand, you may want to check sites weekly, or even daily.
This helps you stay on top of how your keyword rankings are changing so you can make the necessary adjustments to keep your SEO strategy effective.
Keep in mind that rankings tend to vary depending on personalization, which data center you hit, and more.
Most agencies and brands track rankings month to month, quarter over quarter, etc.
Tips For Effective Rank Tracking
Here are some tips on how to track keyword rankings effectively:
When You Shouldn’t Use Rank Tracking, And Additional Considerations
Featured Image: chaylek/Shutterstock
Why ranking method is used?
The main advantage of the site evaluation method – and the reason for its development in the first place – is to quickly identify who is at the top when it comes to achieving the company’s key goals.
What are the benefits of graduation? 5 Benefits of Ranking on Page 1
- Visibility.
- Credibility.
- Increased Conversion Rates.
- 24/7 Reach.
- Long Term Results.
What is ranking method in research?
Ranking is a question response format used when a researcher is interested in establishing some sort of priority among a set of objects, whether they are policies, attributes, organizations, individuals, or some other topic or property of interest.
Why is ranking important in research?
Applying rank order to evaluate items or persons remains a very popular and easy way for researchers to make important distinctions. Using such scales provides a method of measurement that matches, in many cases, how people naturally evaluate or represent attempts at measurement.
Why ranking method is used?
The main advantage of the ranking method – and the reason it was developed in the first place – is to quickly identify who is at the top of the class when it comes to achieving the company’s key goals.
What is the ranking method?
A rating method is a method of evaluating performance. The grading method is the oldest and most conventional method. In this method all the employees are compared on the basis of value. They are ranked from best to worst.
What is rank method example?
In this method, one employee is compared to another employee. The end result is ordering employees from best to worst. For example, in a group of ‘n’ employees, the performance of employee-1 is compared to the performance of ‘n-1’ employees. The performance of employee-2 is compared to the performance of employees ‘n-1’.
What is an advantage of the ranking method of evaluation?
The advantages of the individual rating method are that it is easy to understand and use, it is easy to compare job performance, and it saves money and time. The disadvantages of the individual rating method are that it is not easy to compare all the employees in practice and for large organisations, it is not relevant.
Which of the following is an advantage of the job ranking method of job evaluation?
Which of the following is an advantage of the job rating method of job evaluation? It is easy to explain. One of the major disadvantages of the point method of job evaluation is that it: takes a lot of time and is expensive to develop.
What is ranking in performance evaluation?
Site Methods. In a ranking system (also known as stack ranking), employees in a particular department are ranked based on their value to the manager or supervisor. This system is a comparative method for evaluating performance.
What is ranking method used for?
A simple method of job evaluation where jobs are rated according to an informal assessment of their overall importance to the organisation. This method is quick and cheap but becomes difficult to maintain as organizations become larger and more complex.
What is the purpose of ranking method?
A rating method is a method of evaluating performance. The grading method is the oldest and most conventional method. In this method all the employees are compared on the basis of value. They are ranked from best to worst.
What is ranking method in management?
Site Methods. In a ranking system (also known as stack ranking), employees in a particular department are ranked based on their value to the manager or supervisor. This system is a comparative method for evaluating performance.
What is the purpose of ranking process?
Information retrieval scaling is an important concept in computer science and is used in many different applications such as search engine queries and recommender systems. Most search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.
What percentage of players are Plat 3?
| Site | % highest |
|---|---|
| Platinum 2 | 26.6 |
| Platinum 3 | 21.3 |
| Diamond 1 | 16.7 |
| Diamond 2 | 12.3 |
What percentage of players are Plat 3 in Valorant? Valorant grade distribution in November 2022 (vs October): Silver: 21.9% (22.6%) Gold: 20.8% (21.1%) Platinum: 16.3% (16.3%) Diamond: 10.6% (10%)
How do I get high ranking keywords?
What are the main Google keyword ranking factors for SEO keywords? Google’s main keyword ranking factors include search intent, search volume, content quality, number of backlinks, domain authority, and page load speed.
Is rank tracker safe to download?
Download Rank Tracker 8.44. We guarantee 100% privacy. Your information will not be shared. You will receive your download links and installation instructions as well as software best practice guides and periodic SEO updates via email.
What is Rank Tracker tool? Rank Tracker is the most powerful tracking software suitable for all types of professional SEO tasks. You can track ranks with no keyword limits, check rankings in desktop and mobile SERPs, optimize local search, do keyword research, analyze competitor keywords and traffic all in one ranking tool.
Is Rank Tracker free?
Rank Tracker is one of our free tools that allows you to monitor the position of your keywords on a search engine results page or SERP. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website (or that of a competitor) and hit analyze.
How can I check my website ranking for free?
Google PR Checker is a free online tool for determining a website’s PageRank. It’s similar to a page score calculator, but much more useful. PageRank is an independent metric used by the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the quality, authority and trustworthiness of a web page.