You can also assess how your website is responding to changes in your SEO strategy to help boost traffic to your website and meet key performance indicators.<\/p>\n
What Is Rank Tracking?<\/h2>\n
Rank tracking<\/a> is still an important part of any successful SEO strategy and a key metric that most SEO pros, site owners, and marketers continue to measure.<\/p>\n It allows you to measure how effective your optimization efforts have been once your keywords start to rank and deliver traffic, revenue, and conversions over time, which is the goal of SEO.<\/p>\n If you have keywords that rank at the top of Google that don\u2019t deliver any business value, then your SEO efforts have been wasted.<\/p>\n By tracking keyword rankings<\/a> on a regular basis and analyzing trends over time, you\u2019ll gain valuable insights into how effective your overall SEO strategy is at driving organic traffic to your website \u2013 and potentially lifting conversions and sales.<\/p>\n This can be used to identify areas of opportunity for improving visibility and helping more people find what you have to offer.<\/p>\n Fortunately, there are a number of tools and platforms available that make it easy to check where your keywords rank.<\/p>\n But here is how to do it the right way based on my experience and some tips on how to track rankings effectively.<\/p>\n First, decide which keywords you want to track using your SEO platform or point solution.<\/p>\n You can also track keywords manually by just searching for the keyword in Google, but that is not a sustainable long-term solution.<\/p>\n I always recommend creating different keyword groups based on the hierarchy of your website and breaking it out between branded and unbranded keywords.<\/p>\n Brand terms deliver a good amount of traffic and conversions for most sites, and if you lose rankings for brand it can have a detrimental impact on your bottom line, which makes tracking branded keywords important.<\/p>\n If I were managing SEO for Mrs. Fields\u2019 cookies and tracking keyword rankings, I would break down my keyword groups by the top navigation, i.e.:<\/p>\n Since there are a lot of products, I would break product listings out into their own keyword group as well.<\/p>\n Also, I recommend adding a golden keyword list. These are keywords that your organization deems particularly important, which deliver a lot of business value, and are valuable to stakeholders.<\/p>\n With Google\u2019s move to the mobile-first index<\/a> and search results being different on mobile and desktop, it is a good strategy to track both mobile and desktop rankings. This is especially true because there are many factors at play, for example, personalization, speed, mobile friendliness, etc.<\/p>\n Tracking both keywords on mobile and desktop can be expensive and take up additional bandwidth.<\/p>\n So, if you\u2019re using a point solution or an SEO platform that does not offer unlimited keyword rankings, you may hit your keyword limit quickly \u2013 especially if you\u2019re managing a brand that has thousands or even millions of keywords.<\/p>\n Nothing gets an executive more fired up than showing them that your competition is driving more traffic from keywords that your company needs to own on the first page of Google.<\/p>\n Always monitor your competitor rankings to see where they are getting traffic from, and what new keywords are driving traffic to their websites.<\/p>\n This allows you to see what opportunities you can easily grab through net new content, existing optimization, linking, etc.<\/p>\n Monitoring how your competitors rank for certain keywords will give you a good indication of how well you are doing in comparison, and what content you may need.<\/p>\n It may also inform your strategy when looking at how to improve your page rankings in the future.<\/p>\n Pay attention to competitor positions on non-brand; this is a good indicator of where good content will get your brand as well.<\/p>\n Paying attention to your ranking distribution lets you focus on quick wins \u2013 for example, striking distance opportunities (keywords that rank from positions 11 to 20) where small tweaks can potentially have a significant impact and drive more incremental traffic, revenue, and conversions.<\/p>\n Paying attention to keywords that rank in traffic-driving positions (i.e., positions 4 to 10) and emerging positions (21 to 40) can also help you track performance and opportunities to drive incremental visibility.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re a regional or local business, it\u2019s important to keep an eye on how your website is performing in different geographic regions.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Additionally, make sure to track how keywords are trending over time, and how they\u2019re affected by algorithm updates, site updates, or other external factors.<\/p>\n There are a lot of third-party rank tracking tools<\/a>, point solutions, and platforms that you can use to track rankings, for example, Traject Data<\/a>, Semrush<\/a>, Ahrefs<\/a>, BrightEdge<\/a>, or Conductor<\/a>, to name a few.<\/p>\n These tools allow you to enter any URL along with the keyword you want to check, and then provide you with an overview of how well that page ranks for that term.<\/p>\n They also offer insights into things like competition level, so you can get an idea of how hard it would be to move up in rankings.<\/p>\nWhy Rank Tracking Is Important For SEO<\/h2>\n
How To Track Ranking With Keyword Groups<\/h2>\n
![\"Mrs](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/rank-tracking-how-to-do-it-the-right-way-via-sejournal-wburton27.png\"){kind=tracking}
Screenshot from Mrs. Fields, December 2022<\/span><\/div>\nMobile And Desktop<\/h3>\n
Monitoring Competitor Rankings<\/h3>\n
Ranking Distribution<\/h3>\n
![\"rankings](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/rank-tracking-how-to-do-it-the-right-way-via-sejournal-wburton27-1.png\"){kind=tracking}
Screenshot from author, December 2022<\/span><\/div>\nRegional And Local Tracking<\/h3>\n
Rank Tracking Tools You Can Use<\/h2>\n