To track or not to track? There’s been a debate among SEO professionals and webmasters if it’s important to keep track of rankings. Besides that, I admit that many website owners just don’t understand why and how to monitor online positions to get the best results for SEO performance.
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So in this article, I’ve decided to highlight the top reasons why you should track your rankings and how to do that. You’ll get hacks of using rank tracking data for the benefit. And I am sure that you will agree that keyword tracking is a crucial task for successful SEO.
Let’s dive in!
Measure the impact of your SEO efforts
When you analyze your rankings, you are aware of the evolution of your positions, determine strengths and weaknesses. When you work on SEO, do some on-page or technical changes, add new content with target keywords, it leads to a rise in your positions.
It’s essential to measure your SEO efforts, understand the impact, and analyze what works and influences the results. Monitor your positions and set up alerts to see the bigger picture.
Identify new opportunities for higher rankings
When you work hard on SEO, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye open for new opportunities. Rank tracking tools allow you to find keywords that can give you lots of traffic. For instance, you got ranked for a specific keyword but the position in the SERP is only 14. Search volume is quite high and you haven’t worked on optimizing for that keyword before. So why should you get the chance to rank higher and gain a lot of new traffic?
Besides that, some tools, like Wincher or Accuranker, also send you notifications with the keywords which your website is already ranked for but you even didn’t know about that. Don’t miss the opportunities.
Keep an eye on your competitors to outrank them
With advanced rank tracking tools, you shouldn’t track your positions manually. Moreover, most platforms allow you to track the rankings of your competitors too. That feature is super helpful if you are determined to work on SEO and get more organic traffic and leads from search engines.
So professional rank tracker not only delivers data on the performance of your website but also allows you to check how your competitors rank for targeted keywords, that are important for you.
How can you get the most of that data? If you keep tracking positions of competitive websites, you can identify whether they launch new content or landing pages to rank higher for specific phrases. If your competitor outranked you, you can analyze the changes on their website and specific page to work on your web copy and solidify positions. The successful solutions lie in permanent monitoring and prompt actions.
Identify keywords to optimize pages for
Before creating any relevant strategy, it’s important to analyze the current situation. The same rule works for SEO strategy too: you should assess current positions for important target keywords and find hidden opportunities.
For instance, you find out that you are on the second page of the SERP for an important target keyword for your business. In this case, there is a good chance to optimize your page for that specific keyword to get ranked higher. Perhaps, you can do some on-page optimization or improve web copy. Changes will come!
So start tracking your keywords, analyze the history of rankings and create a list of strategic keywords for which you want to be ranked higher.
Troubleshoot drops of positions and traffic
Sudden traffic drops are the pain of every SEO specialist. It may be caused by changes in Google algorithms, technical glitches, a penalty or something else. The first reason happens quite often, as Google is known for its algorithms updates that can break down your SEO strategy and strong positions quickly. You should monitor new ranking signals.
Anyway, if you’ve got into such a situation, it’s a good idea to start reviewing keyword rankings. Moreover, you need to see the bigger picture and trends, so ranking history and dynamic data will be necessary. Fortunately, rank trackers offer historical data for a long period of time.
To troubleshoot drops of positions, review your rankings first. It will allow you to notice which keywords or pages have dropped and when it happened. It will lead to hypotheses about why that happened and what you should do to overcome the situation and solve the problem.
How to track rankings
Manual checking positions have played out a long time ago. Nowadays, there are lots of professional rank trackers and all-in-one SEO tools that deliver daily rankings updates and send alerts directly to your email. Two of the most popular rank trackers are Ahrefs and SemRush, which can handle just about anything you need when it comes to keyword rankings. Moreover, you can set up notifications, add your colleagues and create insightful reports automatically. There is a golden rule of modern business: automate everything that you can automate. In this case, you will have time for working on important points and data for making the right decisions.
How do rank trackers work? Despite the variety of SEO tools, there is a common process of tracking keywords. You should upload a list of your keywords to the platform and set up the frequency of notifications. Voila! You’re tracking your rankings.
If you don’t have a complete list of target phrases, do in-depth keyword research to find the most important keywords. In the case of Wincher, the keyword research tool is integrated with a rank tracker, so you can add new keywords to track with one click.
Final thoughts
Rank tracking isn’t just about the data. It’s a huge resource for higher rankings and growth of traffic, the evolution of online visibility. So I would definitely recommend keeping your positions tracking to make better decisions and grow online.
What rank tracking tool do you use on the daily basis?
