What is rank tracking?

Rank tracking is checking positions of keywords that a website ranks for in search engine result pages (SERPs). These keywords include the following types:

1. Keywords that are used on the website.
2. Many other terms you necessarily don’t optimize for.
3. Keywords that your competitor rank for.

Rank tracking is about tracking and analyzing the organic positions of keywords in time. It’s based on current rankings and historical data, so you can analyze the progress and its impact on organic traffic.

The main advantages of using a rank tracker:

• You can see daily updated positions of your most important keywords
• You are able to quickly detect any significant ranking drops or spikes through automatic reports and alerts
• You can track your progress is a specific location (e.g. country or city)
• You also see relevant metrics to see the actual impact of the changes (e.g. the search volumes of the keywords)
• You can track your competitors to compare your results

Goal setting tips

Measurable: If you can’t track it, you can’t improve it.

Be specific: Don’t let vague industry marketing jargon water down your goals.

Share your goals: Studies have shown that writing down and sharing your goals with others boosts your chances of achieving them.

Measuring

Now that you’ve set your primary goal, evaluate which additional metrics could help support your site in reaching its end goal. Measuring additional (applicable) benchmarks can help you keep a better pulse on current site health and progress.

Engagement metrics

How are people behaving once they reach your site? That’s the question that engagement metrics seek to answer. Some of the most popular metrics for measuring how people engage with your content include:

Conversion rate

The number of conversions (for a single desired action/goal) divided by the number of unique visits. A conversion rate can be applied to anything, from an email signup to a purchase to account creation. Knowing your conversion rate can help you gauge the return on investment (ROI) your website traffic might deliver.

Time on page

How long did people spend on your page? If you have a 2,000-word blog post that visitors are only spending an average of 10 seconds on, the chances are slim that this content is being consumed (unless they’re a mega-speed reader). However, if a URL has a low time on page, that’s not necessarily bad either. Consider the intent of the page. For example, it’s normal for “Contact Us” pages to have a low average time on page.

Pages per visit

Was the goal of your page to keep readers engaged and take them to a next step? If so, then pages per visit can be a valuable engagement metric. If the goal of your page is independent of other pages on your site (ex: visitor came, got what they needed, then left), then low pages per visit are okay.

Bounce rate

“Bounced” sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Many people try to lower this metric because they believe it’s tied to website quality, but it actually tells us very little about a user’s experience. We’ve seen cases of bounce rate spiking for redesigned restaurant websites that are doing better than ever. Further investigation discovered that people were simply coming to find business hours, menus, or an address, then bouncing with the intention of visiting the restaurant in person. A better metric to gauge page/site quality is scroll depth.

Scroll depth

This measures how far visitors scroll down individual webpages. Are visitors reaching your important content? If not, test different ways of providing the most important content higher up on your page, such as multimedia, contact forms, and so on. Also consider the quality of your content. Are you omitting needless words? Is it enticing for the visitor to continue down the page? Scroll depth tracking can be set up in your Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics, you can set up goals to measure how well your site accomplishes its objectives. If your objective for a page is a form fill, you can set that up as a goal. When site visitors accomplish the task, you’ll be able to see it in your reports.

Search traffic

Ranking is a valuable SEO metric, but measuring your site’s organic performance can’t stop there. The goal of showing up in search is to be chosen by searchers as the answer to their query. If you’re ranking but not getting any traffic, you have a problem.

But how do you even determine how much traffic your site is getting from search? One of the most precise ways to do this is with Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics to uncover traffic insights

Google Analytics (GA) is bursting at the seams with data — so much so that it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to look. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a general guide to some of the traffic data you can glean from this free tool.

Isolate organic traffic

GA allows you to view traffic to your site by channel. This will mitigate any scares caused by changes to another channel (ex: total traffic dropped because a paid campaign was halted, but organic traffic remained steady).

Traffic to your site over time

GA allows you to view total sessions/users/pageviews to your site over a specified date range, as well as compare two separate ranges.

How many visits a particular page has received

Site Content reports in GA are great for evaluating the performance of a particular page — for example, how many unique visitors it received within a given date range.

Traffic from a specified campaign

You can use UTM (urchin tracking module) codes for better attribution. Designate the source, medium, and campaign, then append the codes to the end of your URLs. When people start clicking on your UTM-code links, that data will start to populate in GA’s “campaigns” report.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Your CTR from search results to a particular page (meaning the percent of people that clicked your page from search results) can provide insights on how well you’ve optimized your page title and meta description. You can find this data in Google Search Console, a free Google tool.

In addition, Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy tracking pixels to your website without having to modify the code. This makes it much easier to track specific triggers or activity on a website.

Types of Rank Tracking Tools

Keyword ranking tools come in different forms and can be classified based on installation type.

The three main types are:

1. Web Browser Plugins
2. Desktop Applications
3. Web-Based SaaS Applications

1. Web Browser Plugins

Browser plugins are add-ons that extend the capabilities of your web browser. SEOBook’s Firefox Rank Checker Extension is the only one of its kind.

Advantage

Using a plugin is helpful because it can mask the scraping tool as a web browser.

Because Google doesn’t like rank tracking tools, if it tries to detect the user-agent, which is like the identification card of a web browser, it will appear as Firefox instead of a scraping script because the tool runs within Firefox.

It runs instantaneously, thus if you need to find the ranking quickly, you can use this plugin and get the ranking numbers right away.

Disadvantage

Even when a Firefox plugin has the user-agent of a normal web browser, the speed and behavior of the queries done from the same IP address will appear unnatural.

Getting blocked from search engines is common when using this plugin if you run a large number of keywords.

Browser plugin ranking tools are ideal for small sets of keywords, typically 100 or less, when you want the results immediately.

2. Desktop Applications

Desktop applications are programs you install on your own computer.As a standalone program, they do not require the web browser.They are capable of running larger lists of keywords without getting blocked by Google.

Desktop applications accomplish this in two ways:

• Emulating human behavior by adding time and pauses between queries, copying a web browser user-agent, downloading all page assets (e.g., images), and not just the ranking results.
• Using a rotating list of IP addresses that you supply. This allows the tool to make it appear as if the queries are coming from different computers worldwide.

Examples of tools like this:

• Web CEO
• SEO Smart Suite
• Internet Business Promoter
• Advanced Web Ranking

Many of these tools are not only for rank tracking and can be used for a number of purposes like backlink analysis or keyword research.

Advantage

Can run a larger amount of keywords compared to the browser plugin tool without getting blocked by Google.

Disadvantage

Even with human emulation and using a number of proxy IP addresses, if you are using this within a digital marketing agency that has multiple SEO clients, it will be difficult to handle them all. You can’t speed up the process because that will counteract the human emulation.

You can attempt to increase the number of IP addresses, but this greatly increases the cost if you are getting new IP addresses just for the sole purpose of rank tracking.

Desktop application rank tracking tools are ideal to use for small boutique SEO businesses, or for conducting SEO on your non-SEO business.

This works when you don’t have a large amount of keywords to track, and it will keep the cost down.

3. Web-Based SaaS Solutions

Web-based software as a service (SaaS) solutions do not run on your local computers. Instead, they run on a subscription-based server.This eliminates the challenge of maintaining multiple IP addresses.

These solutions don’t run on your computer, so you don’t need to worry about leaving them running overnight.This really is a better solution, which is why many of the desktop applications mentioned above also have web-based versions of their products.

Some of these web-based services focus primarily on ranking, while others have multiple capabilities.

Primarily rank tracking tools:

• Authority Labs
• AWRCloud
• Stat

Multipurpose SEO tools that include rank tracking:

• Dragon Metrics
• Linkdex
• Bright Edge
• Searchmetrics
• Conductor
• seoClarity
• Moz

Advantage

Web-based solutions are more stable, require less maintenance, and manage IP rotation for you.

Many of the web-based tools have the capability to track local results within a city, as well as international results for different countries, which allows you to track ranking for your target market.

Disadvantage

Web-based solutions tend to cost more than the desktop application rank trackers and, because they run on a server, most rank tracking is queued and scheduled, so you won’t get immediate results.It’s best to use these SaaS solutions when you are a large digital marketing agency or a large SEO company.

The other options may not be able to handle the large volume of keyword tracking that is needed when dealing with multiple clients.

Tracking Number of Indexed Pages

Aside from tracking the ranking of keywords in search engines, you can also track the amount of pages indexed by search engines.

There are three ways to determine this in Google:

• Using the Site: operator to view the number of results that appear for a specific domain.
• Using Google Search Console’s (GSC) report on the number of indexed pages.
• Using GSC’s status of indexed pages within your submitted XML sitemap.

All three will often give different results.

Usually the GSC indexed pages will give the largest number of pages, but may include duplicate content pages.

GSC’s status on the pages indexed within your XML sitemap is only helpful if your XML sitemap has a complete list of all the URLs on your site.

The site: operator will often have the fewest number of URLs because it removes pages with thin or duplicate content, low-quality pages, and spammy pages.

This information can be obtained from Google alone; however, there are many tools that will pull this information for you along with their rank tracking software.

Tracking Local Maps Ranking

In local SEO, you must optimize organic search results containing geographic information like a city, state or country.

You also must optimize the results in Google Maps and other online map websites where the ranking algorithm is different from the main organic search algorithm.

Since optimization here is targeted separately, it needs to be tracked separately using local map rank tracking tools.

One platform that does this is BrightLocal. It will track your businesses ranking within local maps results and you can set the location of where the search query runs.

Pricing Is Determined by the Number of Keywords

Every search query uses server resources on web-based rank tracking tools.

It takes a longer time to run and increases the risk of getting blocked by search engines.When running desktop applications, you can add in as many keywords you like, but to avoid getting blocked by search engines, you either decrease the speed of the request or you can keep the speed high but increase the number of IP addresses you will use to run the queries.

Running the request more slowly will cost more as it will take longer to complete.Using a higher number of IP addresses also incurs additional costs.

2 Tools That Have No Price on the Number of Keywords

Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is free.

Google doesn’t charge by the keyword, but you aren’t allowed to specifically assign keywords to track.It will just show you the top 1,000 keywords that have high rankings, impressions, and clicks.

SEMrush

You can assign specific keywords to be tracked and priced accordingly.

If you don’t assign keywords, it will scrape various phrases from the pages of your site and check the ranking of those phrases at a low frequency, about once a month or longer.

Both GSC and SEMrush may not choose the keywords you really want to track, and they won’t give you the latest ranking numbers, but they can supply you with thousands to literally millions of keywords that your site ranks for.