Does your SEO strategy work? Take a look at your site’s rankings on Google and you’ll know where you stand. Knowing your positions on SERPs allows you to estimate visibility in organic search, calculate potential traffic, and see what’s happening in your niche.
Your site’s rankings constitute the positions your URLs occupy on SERPs for particular keywords. These positions fluctuate all the time and are influenced by your own SEO activities, or your competitors’ actions, or Google’s algorithm updates.
With so many factors at play, ranking fluctuations are difficult to predict. At the same time, you should spot the ups and downs in your site’s ranking in a timely manner and act quickly upon them. But monitoring positions for hundreds or thousands of keywords can’t be done manually.
You need a reliable rank tracking tool!
If you don’t have a Google rank checker in your SEO toolset yet, it’s time to add one. There are a lot of great tools on the market, but one of them truly stands out. That’s SE Ranking.
It’s important to note that SE Ranking is a feature-rich SEO platform. At a very affordable price, you get almost endless capabilities. The best way to discover them all is by signing up for a free trial. You’ll quickly see why over 500,000 SEO professionals and entrepreneurs use this software daily.
However, if you just want to know how to track positions in SE Ranking, we’ve got you covered. This short review pays special attention to a few killer features the platform has. Let’s see why Google rank tracker by SE Ranking does what you need the way you need it.
Smart Keyword Management at The Kickoff
To track positions with Google rank tracker, you should first collect and sort a list of target keywords. With SE Ranking, you can add keywords right during the signup. You’ll specify your domain to create a new project, choose the SERP depth (top 100 or 200) to analyze, select countries to target, and specify competitors whose rankings you also want to track (BTW, free of charge).
On the second step of the project setup, the system suggests you add some keywords. There are four different ways to do it—feel free to choose one or combine them. If you already have a list of keywords at hand—use it. If you haven’t collected a list yet—SE Ranking will suggest keywords based on what your domain or your competitors’ domains are ranking for. Let’s look closer at how this works:
1.Import keywords from a CSV file - Having a list of previously collected keywords, or a list of keywords with position history downloaded from a different tool, click the Import keywords button to upload them.
2.Source keywords from your Google Analytics account - On the Import keywords menu, you can choose to give SE Ranking permission to read and upload data from the Google Analytics and Search Console properties connected to your Google account. Don’t worry — it’s safe and you can remove access at any time.
3.Add the list of keywords suggested by SE Ranking to your project - In the Keyword Suggestions area, select a domain (yours or someone else’s), specify the target country, and get a list of automatically collected keywords. To add them all at once, click the “+” button next to the Keywords column. Alternatively, you can add only some of them by clicking the “+” next to every suitable suggested keyword.
4.Copy and paste a list of keywords manually - You can copy a list of keywords or copy keywords one by one from somewhere else and paste it right in the Add manually area.
If you want SE Ranking to reflect your keyword clusters, there’s a special feature for you. You can add semantically or otherwise similar keywords in portions and save them into different groups.
Add keywords to the Add manually area, create a new group and click the Add Keywords button. The new folder with keywords will add up to the Keywords Added list. You can also group keywords when you import them. For this, your file should have a column with keywords and a column with the group names. The CSV file should use a semicolon as a separator. Grouping matters because SE Ranking will show data for every separate keyword, as well as for every group.
You’ll see how many keywords you’ve already added and how many more you can add. Depending on your payment plan, you may add 250 to 20000 keywords. And that’s a great deal because you pay for the keywords added but can track them across multiple countries. With other tools, SEO tracking settings can make the price go through the roof, but not with SE Ranking.
If you don’t manage to add all your keywords at once during setup, don’t worry. Adding new keywords is possible anytime after you create the project. You’ll be able to open the keywords handling interface with the same capabilities from your Rankings module using the Add Keywords button.
Unbiased Day-to-Day and Real-Time Keyword Ranking Data
Search results are dynamic. They depend on location, device, and vary from person to person. With SE Ranking you’ll see the most up-to-date and unbiased positions for Google’s SERPs for desktop and mobile, different regions, languages, and devices.
Your site’s positions will be checked daily. You can even set up a particular time of day you want to do it. Moreover, if you manually recheck rankings by clicking Recheck Data > Recheck Rankings, you’ll see the real-time positions in the table.
SE Ranking shows you day-by-day positions for the time span you choose in the calendar, be it last week, a year, or a custom period. You’ll also see if your positions were raised or dropped on a certain day compared to the first date in the selected period. In addition, you can analyze the ranking dynamics in a more visual way using the graphs available over the Rankings table.
If you want to have more context on every tracked keyword, you can customize the Rankings table. For example, you can display search volume and SERP features in additional columns. By the way, SE Ranking analyzes 35 types of SERP features—such as featured snippets, rich results, knowledge graphs—and highlights those earned by your pages.
What's most important about the data in SE Ranking is its accuracy. When in doubt, you can view SERPs for any date. Just click on any keyword position number in the table and you’ll see a popup with detailed information on the keyword ranking on a particular day:
You can view the SERP the system saved to cash when processing the keyword. Then, you can check the live SERP to see if anything has changed since then. Such transparency proves that you can trust the data.
Target Pages to Track for Every Keyword
When optimizing your site, it’s important to cluster your keywords and split them across your site’s pages. That’s because you don’t want your pages to compete against one another on SERPs, but rather rank for different and, most importantly, relevant keywords.
With SE Ranking, you’ll know if your clustering strategy works as intended. On the Rankings table, select one or several keywords (1) and use the Target URL feature (2) to specify the page that’s been optimized for them. If any other URL is ranking for these keywords instead of the desired one, the system will highlight the position numbers and the link icon in red (3).
The Target URL feature allows you to quickly notice if your site has any of the following issues:
If the SERP changes and a different page starts ranking for a keyword, you’ll see the red number next to the link icon. You’ll see ‘2’ if the URL has changed once, or ‘3’ if it has changed twice, and so on. Hover over the icon, and you’ll see the date when the change happened.
Competitors’ Keyword Rankings Monitoring
Your site is not alone in SERPs. So you probably want to keep an eye on your competitors to spot when they have made another successful attempt to rank higher. SE Ranking allows you to add up to 20 competitors and see how their pages behave on SERPs. Check the Added Competitors table in the My Competitors module, and you’ll see how their rankings for your target keywords change over the time period of your interest.
But that’s not all. You can see your URLs that show up on SERPs for particular keywords, as well as how they move around it. For this, open the SERP Competitors table in the My Competitors module. There you can select a keyword (1), search engine (2), and time period (3) to see what changes happen on the SERP day by day.
This function is of great help when you want to understand what is happening in the SERPs in your niche. You can spot new players early or see if old ones launch successful SEO campaigns. If someone’s rankings changed drastically, it’s a sign that you should analyze that site a bit closer to know the reason.
Another great feature is Visibility Rating. It calculates your site’s visibility on Google, taking into account what keywords it ranks for and what positions they occupy. The site that is ranking for more keywords, with bigger search volumes, and at higher positions gets the best visibility score.
You can use Visibility Rating to compare the share of impressions of every one of the sites you added and the ones a competitor owns. In the table, you’ll see domains organized by current visibility score. On the line chart, you’ll see visibility in dynamics.
A Handful of Small and Useful Features
After you get familiar with the main capabilities for keyword rank tracking in Google, you’ll discover a lot of small features that make your life easier. For example, you can add notes about significant SEO fixes to see how they influenced positions. Or you can share a guest link with your colleagues or clients who require a keyword ranking report from you, without adding new users to the tool. You can also configure the system to track positions on Google Maps and in the paid search, along with organic search results.
SE Ranking’s rank tracking tool has proved to be a good source of SEO insights and is definitely worth trying. When compared to its alternatives, SE Ranking offers the best value for the money. And with new features released monthly, the value that you get is growing over time.
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