How to Master the Rank Tracking Game

Keywords play a critical role in SEO, and in order to keep track of where your site stands, you should stay up-to-date on your keyword rankings. Tracking keyword rankings will help to ensure that your site is visible, takes up valuable search engine real estate, and drives incremental traffic to your site, consequently increasing your sales, conversions, and revenue.

With the right tools - such as Rank Tracker - as well as platforms and processes in place, you will be able to monitor your site performance effectively. This, in turn, will help you create an effective keyword strategy that will yield results over time.

Why is rank tracking important?

Effective rank tracking helps you determine your traffic level, and what you need to do to increase it. Staying on top of keyword trends also helps keep you aware of changes in your industry in general.

When you look at your rank tracking history, it gives you an indication of how successful your SEO efforts have been over different periods and allows you to make changes accordingly.

You also need to ensure that the keywords you’re using are the right ones. You could be using strong keywords for selling Coca-Cola products, but if you’re in the apparel industry, that might not be helping you at all.

Make your search comprehensive

In conducting your rank tracking, there are additional factors that you should keep in mind in order to make sure that your search is truly comprehensive.

Cross-device check

When using your Google rank tracker to track your results, you want to be sure that you cover all of the areas where your search results might end up. For example, results might appear differently depending on the type of device you’re looking at.

Google offers a mobile-first index, in addition to the one it has for PCs. This index is distinctly different from the PC one, so it’s a good idea to track your rankings on both of them. Results can also be personalized for different users, so determining the defining features of your target demographic is critical, as well.

Searcher location plays a role

Unless you are Walmart, you’re probably operating within a specific geographical area. Therefore, your rank tracking efforts should include results from different levels of geographical groupings. You should be looking both at local results, as well as larger, regional results to see how well you fare in different areas. This way, you can target your marketing efforts more accurately depending on where you get the most traffic.

Mastering the keyword ranking game

The process of figuring out exactly what keywords you should be using can be tricky. But there are techniques you can use to simplify the process. One thing you’ll want to be sure of is that you use the right platform. Be sure to choose a platform that offers unlimited keyword rankings, or you may well find yourself limited in number.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to track, it would be a good idea to put them into groups to simplify the process. You can do this in order of importance, with primary keywords being in one spot, and different tiers being lower on the hierarchy.

You should also be familiar with the difference between keywords that have brands attached to them and those that don’t. This depends very much on your industry, of course, but it is something to keep in mind. And you should also stay on top of where brands stand in the rankings, because of course if you’re using a name that is itself going downhill, it will be to your detriment as well. Conversely, using brands that are doing particularly well will help you in the rankings.

Another thing to keep in mind is that generic keywords are ultimately more important than branded ones. People who conduct searches are usually looking for features, so you want to be able to speak to this as much as possible.

Make note of ranking distribution

Another thing that you should pay attention to is what exactly your ranking distribution is. Which ones end up in the top 10? Top 20? You should look at your results in terms of number and see which keywords that rank in mid-tier positions, for example, might better help your cause in the future if utilized more effectively.

In addition, results often include a “People also ask…” section. It is a good idea to look through these results as well as they are indicative of what types of things a given target group is probably looking for.

Keep an eye on the competition

Another thing that you should be doing is keeping an eye on the ranking of your competitors. This is as much the case for SEO as it is for sales statistics. In figuring out how strong your competitors are, you should assess not only the place that your competitors occupy in the SERP, but also the source of their traffic and any other particulars that might be relevant to your own efforts. Are there significant differences in the use of keywords between you and them, for example?

You can also analyze your competitor’s search traffic.Once you have identified your competitors, add their websites to your Google Search Console account. To do this, go to the "Add Property" section and enter the URL of your competitor's website. After adding your competitor's site to Search Console, you can analyze their search traffic. Go to the "Search Traffic" section and click on "Search Analytics." Here, you can see the search queries that are driving traffic to your competitor's site, as well as the pages that are getting the most clicks.

What to look for in a rank tracker

Obviously, a critical part of your success will be the quality of the tool you choose. There are a number of programs out there now. You should look for one that allows you to look up any site you wish and check keywords. Better programs should also indicate where pages stand vis-a-vis one another so that you can assess where you rank in comparison to others.

Depending on your industry, you should do this with different degrees of frequency. For certain industries where numbers tend to fluctuate rapidly, you want to carry out the process on at least a weekly basis.

Another good idea is to set up alerts so that you can be notified on a regular basis and not have to consciously think about scheduling in the process.

It is also a good idea to use Google Search Console as it will give you a more accurate idea of which key phrases are truly helping your business. Not all keywords help business growth, so this will be a more effective way to figure out which ones are really helpful. Use different SEO tactics

In order to keep your website fully optimized, you need to keep on top of several different things in addition to keyword ranking: content optimization (both text and other media), meta descriptions, etc. It is a process that you should repeat regularly in order to stay on top of things.