Tracking keyword rankings is still important if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.
Tracking keyword rankings can help you ensure that your website is visible, taking up valuable search engine space and bringing you incremental traffic, sales, conversions and revenue.
With the right tools, platforms, and processes, you can monitor your site's performance, helping you create an effective strategy.keyword searchstrategy that produces results over time.
You can also assess how your site is responding to changes in your SEO strategy to help increase traffic to your site and meet key performance indicators.
What is rank tracking?
range trackingremains an important part of any successful SEO strategy and a key metric that most SEO professionals, website owners and marketers continue to measure.
It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your optimization efforts when your keywords start to rank and drive traffic, revenue and conversions over time, which is what SEO is all about.
Why Rank Tracking is Important for SEO
If you have keywords ranking at the top of Google that offer no commercial value, then your SEO efforts have been wasted.
Forkeyword ranking trackingregularly and by looking at trends over time, you'll gain valuable insights into how effective your overall SEO strategy is at driving organic traffic to your site and potentially increasing conversions and sales.
This can be used to identify areas of opportunity to improve visibility and help more people find what you have to offer.
Fortunately, there are several tools and platforms available that make it easy to check your keyword rankings.
But here's how to do it right based on my experience and some tips on how to track rankings effectively.
How to track rankings with keyword groups
First, decide which keywords you want to track using your SEO platform or point solution.
You can also track keywords manually just by searching for the keyword on Google, but this is not a long-term sustainable solution.
I always recommend creating different groups of keywords based on your site's hierarchy and dividing them into branded and non-branded keywords.
Branded terms provide a decent amount of traffic and conversions for most sites, and if you lose rankings for branded, it can have a negative impact on your results, making it harder to track branded keywords.
If I was managing SEO for Mrs. Fields and tracking keyword rankings, I would split my keyword groups by top navigation, i.e.:
Screenshot of Mrs. Fields, December 2022
Since there are so many products, I would also split product listings into their own keyword group.
Also, I recommend adding a list of golden keywords. These are keywords that your organization finds particularly important, that provide a lot of business value, and are valuable to stakeholders.
mobile and desktop
SwindlerGoogle's move to mobile-first indexand search results are different on mobile and desktop, it's a good strategy to track mobile and desktop rankings. This is especially true as there are so many factors at play, for example, customization, speed, mobile compatibility, etc.
Tracking both keywords on mobile and desktop can be costly and consume additional bandwidth.
So if you are using a one-off solution or an SEO platform that doesn't offer unlimited keyword rankings, you can hit your keyword limit quickly, especially if you are managing a brand that has thousands or even millions of keywords. .
Monitoring competitor rankings
Nothing excites an executive more than showing him that his competition is generating more traffic from the keywords his company needs to be on the first page of Google.
Always monitor your competitors' rankings 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 take advantage of through new network content, existing optimization, links, etc.
Monitoring how your competitors are ranking for certain keywords will give you a good indication of how you are doing in comparison and what content you might need.
It can also inform your strategy when looking to improve your page ranking in the future.
Pay attention to the competition's positions on what is not branded; this is a good indicator of where good content will also take your brand.
Rating Distribution
Paying attention to your ranking distribution allows you to focus on quick wins, for example, incredible distance opportunities (keywords ranking in positions 11-20), where small tweaks can have a significant impact and drive more traffic, revenue and incremental conversions.
Paying attention to keywords ranking in the traffic driving positions (i.e. positions 4-10) and emerging positions (21-40) can also help you track performance and opportunities to generate leads. incremental visibility.
Author screenshot, December 2022
Regional and local monitoring
If you're a regional or local business, it's important to keep an eye on how your site is performing across different geographic regions.
This will help you gauge the performance of your local and regional SEO efforts based on where the bulk of your target audience is located.
Also, be sure to track keyword trends 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 partiesrange tracking tools, point solutions, and platforms you can use to track rankings, for example,trajectory data,Semrush,Ahrefs,bright border, oConductor, 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 ranks for that term.
They also offer information about things like the level of competition, so you can get an idea of how difficult it would be to climb the rankings.
An effective way totrack ratingsIt's through automated reporting, so you know regularly how your site is performing.
If you're an e-commerce brand, you might want to check rankings on a weekly or even daily basis.
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.
Note that ratings tend to fluctuate based on customization, the data center you access, and more.
Most agencies and brands track ratings month by month, quarter by quarter, etc.
Tips for Effective Rank Tracking
Here are some tips on how to effectively track keyword rankings:
- Use an accurate tracking tool or platform– When tracking keyword positions, accuracy is key. Look for a solution that provides accurate and comprehensive results so you can gain insight into how your keywords are performing on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- integrate withGoogle Search Console– Rankings are not the best measure of success, only when they provide value i.e. traffic, revenue, sales and conversions. Some brands are tracking millions of keywords, which might not be the best idea as some of those keywords don't provide any commercial value even when ranking high in the SERPs for those terms.
- If you have terms that historically have not provided value when they reached the top of the first page of Google, so those keywords might not be worth trackingbecause they provided no commercial value and may be irrelevant.
- Regularly check ratings and alerts– Track keyword rankings regularly to stay up-to-date on how your pages are performing. Set up alerts in your SEO platform or point solution to notify you if there are drastic changes in visibility, for example your top keywords go from page one to page three.
- update data regularly– Search engines are constantly changing the way they rank pages in their results, so it's important that your provider regularly updates their keyword tracking data with the latest information. This way, you can ensure that your pages remain ranked competitively.
- analyze results– After collecting your data, carefully analyze it to determine how certain pages are performing and how certain changes may affect those rankings over time. This will give you valuable insights on how to better optimize your pages for higher rankings and how to stay competitive on the SERPs.
- To act– Once you've analyzed your data, it's time to act. Make changes to improve your keyword rankings when necessary, such as tweaking titles and meta descriptions, optimizing images and content, or other SEO tactics that can help increase visibility in search engine results. With the right strategy, you can climb the SERP rankings. It's also important to keep track of what SEO changes were made and when, so you can identify which tactics and strategies are working to improve your visibility.
When you shouldn't use rank tracking and additional considerations
- Follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of the value is in 20% of the data, which will make your keyword lists much smaller.
- Weight by volume priority0.10 keywords in position 1 with 10 searches per month are worth less and require more work than 1 keyword in position 10 with 10,000 searches per month.
- If your resources are limited, focus on non-branded productsThere are other warning signs of brand issues besides ratings.
- Pay attention to universal and zero-click resultsas well as informational sites like Wikipedia. If the top of page one is littered with these results, your brand will not make it to the top results.
- Watch out for people who also ask, if this appears at the top of the page1 (e.g. positions two or three). This is a strong sign that the user is looking for different content and the query may not be suitable for optimization efforts.
- Pay attention to the universal result types at the top of the first page.This is a strong signal of the types of content that users want to query. For example, the best content on the webpage cannot beat video if users try to find video content with the query.
More features:
- 3 types of keyword tracking
- Keyword Clusters: How to Improve Your SEO Content Strategy
- Keyword Research: A Detailed Beginner's Guide
Imagem destacada: chaylek/Shutterstock
Category SEO