Monitoring search engine ranking is an important metric determining the overall SEO performance of your website. Knowing about your customers and understanding their needs is fine. But you should also know how high your website’s rankings can go in comparison to your competitors if you aim to establish a successful brand and set yourself apart from others.
Here is how you can monitor search engine ranking along with the reasons to track and challenges faced while doing so. Let’s get started.
Why Track Search Engine Rankings?
You might be having the keywords ranking at the top of the Google search engine. But do they deliver any value? If not, your SEO efforts have proven to be in vain. Researching keywords is as important as tracking their rankings on a regular basis. It helps you gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SEO campaign in terms of driving organic traffic to your site. In this way, you come to know the areas of improvement where you can take steps to boost the visibility of your website, thereby making more people find out about your services.
Before going further with the ways of monitoring search engine ranking, let’s find out the challenges in doing so.
Challenges of Monitoring Search Engine Ranking
- Search Engine Ranking Pages have evolved. Now, you won’t be able to see the traditional ten-blue links anymore.
- You cannot be assured of rankings for every user after getting personalized and localized search results.
- Customers search uniquely on the search engines. Thus, it is challenging to decode the finite set of keywords to track.
- Consequently, having the right data doesn’t make it necessarily possible to evaluate the certainty of how the positions of keywords affect the bottom line of your organization.
But you can definitely establish the success of your SEO campaign by monitoring search engine rankings. Here is how –
Five Ways to Monitor Search Engine Ranking
Manual checking
Manual checking is the first and foremost method to track search engine rankings. What do you have to do here? Enter the keyword in the search bar and scroll through the results till you get your URL or the URL you are looking for. It is advisable to use search operators to make the search easy. Type the keyword on the search engine, keeping it in the double quotation mark. For instance – Typing “SEO Keyword Analysis” will get you across the web pages whose content pieces have this phrase. Experts recommend using private browsing sessions and analyzing search engine rankings from the target location to improve the accuracy of this method.
Google search console
If you wish to know which pages receive the most impressions and clicks, Google Search Console is one of the best free tools you can use. This makes the way for you to intelligently optimize the website for organic search. The steps you need to follow are –
- Go to the search console. Select the property about whose ranking you want to know more.
- Click search results under the performance tab. You will come across the number of clicks, average click-through rate, impressions, and average organic position of your website in the Google Search Result. The default setting of the Google search console shows the clicks and impressions. Ranking positions will be shown once you click the average position.
- It gives you the choice to change the date and make a comparison of the results.
All in all, you just need to verify your website as a property in this tool, and you will get the tracking data.
Google My Business
GMB listing is especially meant for business owners to check the local keywords ranking. Having a GMB profile enables you to use a local rank checker, a tool to track rankings innovatively rather than manually. It helps you immensely when it comes to getting a visual representation of your local keyword rankings from several physical locations where you live (City/town). Don’t have a GMB listing? We recommend you do it now. How do you check your business rankings with it?
- Go to the GMB dashboard to open the business profile.
- Go to “Insights” to check the overall performance of your business listing by clicking on “overview” and “searches breakdown”. Here, you will get the data you require.
Competitor data side-by-side
Whenever you get to analyze the rankings, you get a whole range of data telling you about the success rate of your campaign or the insights to assist you in overcoming the potential visibility problems. But there are times when you need to benchmark your assumptions. And the best way to do that is through the competitors. You can use an SEO platform for the same. It allows you to make a comparison of your performance as well as your competitor’s performance as far as keywords and page-level ranking are concerned.
Group together keywords and pages
The shortest possible answer to track all the keyword rankings is to group the pages and keywords together. How to do that? Using tags to mark specific content types with the help of an SEO Platform. Tags are considered a great option because they give you the versatility to create separate tags for website sections, product lines, or anything that you want. They allow you to mark updated content or newly published content.
Conclusion
Monitoring search engine rankings is extremely important if you want to measure or revamp the SEO strategies you have prepared. Having said that, you don’t need to worry if you can’t handle that all by yourself. You can get assistance from a reliable SEO marketing service named SEO Propellant to sail you seamlessly through all the SEO challenges. Contact us to know more.