Get an Edge on Your Competition With Keyword Rank Tracking
Are you ready to take your SEO game to the next level? You need to start tracking keyword rankings if you’re serious about driving traffic and improving website visibility.
Knowing where your pages rank in the SERPs can give your businesses a competitive edge and help you make strategic decisions about how to optimize for better performance.
This article will discuss why tracking keyword ranking is so important and how to set up a successful monitoring system.
What is Keyword Rank Tracking?
Checking your keyword ranking in the search engines is essential for any online business which wants to succeed. It helps identify what keywords customers use to find a particular website, measure the success of specific content pieces, and provides valuable insight into how well certain pages are performing.
With keyword rank tracking, small businesses better understand how their website stacks up against the competition and can fine-tune strategies to ensure their products reach the top spots on search engine result pages.
By leveraging data from keyword rank tracking results, businesses can optimize campaigns for maximum visibility and ultimately generate more leads and increase sales.
Benefits of Keyword Rank Tracking
1. Understand What Keywords Customers Use: Tracking keyword rankings can help you determine which keywords are driving the most traffic and conversions for your website. You’ll be able to adjust your content strategy accordingly, targeting the right search terms in order to maximize visibility and leads.
2. Measure Content Performance: Keeping track of keyword rank data will help you analyze the performance of individual content pieces. You’ll be able to identify which pages need optimization and where you should focus your efforts in order to boost rankings.
3. Identify Competitor Strengths: Keyword rank tracking can provide valuable insight into what keywords and topics your competitors are targeting, allowing you to stay one step ahead in the race for visibility and better SERP rankings.
4. Make Strategic Decisions: By monitoring keyword rank data, you’ll be able to make smarter decisions about how to optimize your web pages for maximum impact. You’ll also be able to identify opportunities for improvement and target keywords that may offer the highest return on investment.
5. Generate More Leads and Increase Sales: As your keyword rankings improve, so too will your website traffic and leads. With the right SEO strategies in place, you’ll be able to generate more leads and increase sales by leveraging data from keyword rank tracking results.
How to Start With Keyword Rank Tracking
Let’s go over the basics of setting up your keyword tracking.
Choose a Platform
First, you’ll need to choose a tracking platform. There are several options on the market, and it’s important to find one that best fits your needs. Once you’ve selected a platform, you can set up an account and begin monitoring keywords.
You can start tracking your positions with your Google Search Console, but remember that you only get data from Google, and there is no historical data to work with.
The best option is to use quality keyword rank tracking software, such as SE Ranking or Wincher.
These will give you far more information to help you rank, from hourly or daily alerts to worldwide and local ranking information.
They can also help to alert you to algorithm changes to keep your rankings secure, and starter plans begin at around $30 per month.
Identify Which Keywords To Track
Identifying which keywords to track is essential for any successful SEO campaign. There are a few key considerations to keep in mind when selecting which keywords to track.
First, look at the relevance of the keyword to your website and its overall goal. If you’re trying to increase sales revenue, focus on terms that people will search for when looking for a product or service like yours.
Secondly, your keyword research will show you how tough it will be to rank against your competition. If thousands of websites compete for that same term, it may be difficult to rank well and stand out from the crowd.
You should also consider how difficult it would be to rank each keyword. By using tools like the ones I suggested earlier, you can assess each keyword’s difficulty rating based on factors such as search volume and competition level for that particular term.
It’s also important to think about how long it might take before you start seeing results from tracking a certain keyword. If you’re targeting a high-volume keyword with fierce competition, it may take months or even years before you start seeing any significant improvements in your rankings – so pick your words carefully!
Finally, consider whether or not tracking this particular term is worth your investment in both time and money. The most successful SEO campaigns use multiple techniques such as content creation and link building, in addition to simply monitoring rankings – so make sure that investing in tracking this specific keyword isn’t going to take away from other areas where you could be making progress instead.
Set Up Alerts To Track Your Rankings in Real-Time
Setting up alerts is a simple process that requires only a few steps. Inside your chosen software account, enter the keywords you want to track and select “alerts” from the dashboard menu.
Here, you can set parameters for when you want to be notified of changes in specific rankings; for example, if one of your keywords falls below a certain position in the SERPs or rises above another position. You can also choose how often you want notifications sent—daily or weekly are good options if you don’t need frequent updates.
Now that your alerts are set up all that’s left to do is make sure they run smoothly. Regularly review your keyword rankings and tweak any settings needed to ensure accuracy; this might include adjusting which SERP positions trigger an alert or tweaking the frequency of notifications sent out by the tracking service.
Also, setting realistic expectations for ranking improvements can help keep things in perspective; it typically takes several weeks (or even months) before any significant increases in rankings occur after making changes to a website’s SEO strategy or content optimization efforts.
What To Do With The Information
So now you have the software set up, let’s look at what you need to do to maximize your chances of higher rankings.
Analyze Your Competition and Their Strategies
This is a crucial step in understanding how to optimize your website for higher rankings. Use the keyword tracking data you have gathered to assess what techniques the competition is using and which ones work best.
For example, if you notice that one of your competitor’s websites consistently ranks above yours for certain terms, take time to analyze their page content and see what strategies they use. Are they using specific keywords more frequently? Do their pages have lots of internal links or external backlinks?
Another good tip is to examine the websites of top-ranking competitors; while there are no guarantees, you may glean some useful information that could help you improve your website’s content and SEO efforts.
Evaluate How Your Keywords Are Performing
When evaluating the performance of your keywords, start by looking at their position in the SERPs. The higher they rank, the more visibility they will get and the more traffic they are likely to generate.
Your rank tracking tool can tell you which keywords have the highest ranking potential and help you identify targeted opportunities where optimization will have an impact. It’s also important to consider factors such as search volume and competition when evaluating keyword performance.
High-volume words may bring in lots of traffic but could prove difficult to rank for, while less competitive terms may be easier to optimize but may not get much traction.
In addition to evaluating current performance, it’s also important to track growth over time. Monitoring how your keywords move up and down in the SERPs can give you actionable insights into how effective your SEO efforts are and provide evidence for possible strategies or tactics that could improve ranking potential.
Keeping an eye on key metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), average page views per visit, bounce rate, and social shares can also help indicate whether visitors are engaging with your content once they land on your page.
By taking all these elements into account when tracking keyword rankings, you can get a comprehensive view of which strategies are most effective at improving visibility and generating more organic traffic.
Adjust Your Content Strategy Accordingly
When developing a content strategy for optimizing keyword performance, creating content with a higher semantic richness is important. This means that you should use more specific words and phrases that relate to the topic at hand throughout the text. Additionally, you should strive for longer pieces of content since most search engines prefer pages with greater depth. This can give your page an edge over competing sites by providing more context and information about a given topic.
The tool I use for this is Surfer SEO, which analyses the top-ranking sites and suggests keywords to optimize your content and many other features, too, like the length and number of paragraphs and titles.
In addition to creating longer content, it’s also important to use related keywords throughout the text. Doing so will help Google better understand what topics your page covers and how they fit into its overall algorithm.
As such, try to include several variations of key terms when writing and other words related to the subject matter. This way, your page has a better chance of being seen as relevant when users search for certain terms or phrases related to them.
Remember that people search using various keywords to reach your content, not just your main one, so using related semantic keywords can help get your post found by more searchers.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there is much more to tracking and optimizing keyword performance than meets the eye. Taking the time to evaluate competitor sites, track rankings over time, adjust your content strategy accordingly and use related keywords throughout can make a big difference in how well your website performs in search engine results pages (SERPs).
All of these efforts will help you get better visibility for your content and, ultimately, more organic traffic.
Running a small business can be hard work, so make sure you use the tools and tactics outlined here to track and optimize keyword performance to maximize your website’s ranking potential, drive more traffic from search engines, and ultimately boost your profits.
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Ric Hawkins is the founder of richawkins.com and specializes in content creation, SEO, and AI software.
