Whether to track keyword rankings or not, is an ongoing debate among SEOs. You will find many blogs already discussing this subject, but we are here to share our personal opinion.
We strongly recommend our clients keep a close watch on their rankings and we believe we have strong reasons to do so.
Here we are going to share an overview as to why monitoring rankings is still relevant and can be an important part of your SEO success.
We do understand the many challenges with tracking rankings properly. As search engines are getting smarter and better, many forms of SERPs such as localized SERPs and SERP features now change rankings for users on an individual basis. Despite this, ranking data is still an incredible source of irreplaceable SEO insights.
Ranklogs offers you a complete suite of tools to track keyword rankings. It is not just Rank Tracker, but also a Keyword Explorer that offers you a lot of value and insights that you require as an SEO.
Let’s look at the reasons why you should be tracking your ranking data.
Know and Troubleshoot Traffic Drops Immediately
If you run a website then you know that traffic drops happen. Usually, Google algorithm updates are most commonly covered by most SEOs is a reason for fluctuations in traffic, but it is not the only reason.
Apart from Google updates, there can be many other reasons that can cause a drop in traffic. Any technical glitch on your website, design changes, any penalty or manual action by the Google spam team or some unknown reasons can throw keyword positions off.
Reviewing keyword rankings is one of the best metrics to troubleshoot such a drop. However, to be able to check keyword rankings you should have been tracking them for a while because after traffic drop there is no way to understand the trend causing the change in associated rankings.
Rank trackers like Ranklogs allow you to notice when pages or keywords have dropped, and help you recognise what might have caused such ranking dip. For instance, if you are ranking at the top for a keyword and for some reason your top-performing page went from the first page of the SERP to the second, a Rank Tracker can help you immediately recognise the change in ranking and prioritise fixing the issues.
A Tool for New Opportunities
Search results have changed a lot over the last few years. Today, SERP looks nothing like the top 10 blue links we used to have in search engine results.
We all agree that these changes have improved but experience exponentially, but the reality is also that these changes are hard to keep track of from SEO’s perspective. Unless you are tracking featured snippets and other SERP features, it will be difficult to have accurate tracking data to identify ranking opportunities.
If you run a successful online business or your competitor you want to track has a big website, you might have to monitor thousands of keywords and pages. The zero-click searches (SERP features) are important as they can contribute to the overall SEO performance, and not tracking them will lead to lost opportunities.
Today, more than half of the Google searches do not result in a click anymore, it might spook some people on the first read, but it’s a good thing actually. Now, you have new opportunities to target like Zero-Position and Answer Box. These SERP features are comparatively easier to target than ranking in the top 10 results.
However, to avail of those opportunities fully, you will need proper and timely SERP data, that only a rank tracker can provide.
Monitor Your Competitors
Keyword rankings are not just about your own domain’s performance, but they also provide an insight into how your competitors are performing for the same target phrases. You get to know whether they are ranking or not, and also what they are doing to steal away the traffic.
Competitor tracking is a feature included in most rank trackers that can tell you when your competitors launch a new landing page or if they start targeting new phrases with new pages. It is all about the leverage you get in the competition
This is how you can solidify your rankings by improving the content or launching new pages like your competitors and targeting the keywords they are after.
The only way to get your hands on such insights is when you know how your competitors are performing in search and what keywords they are targeting.
Spot Organic CTR Issues
Ranking on the first page gets your content in front of the target audience, but it is still no guarantee that your website will get visitors. Although without ranking in top SERPs your website will never be found, however, to get traffic, visitors must click the listing.
How do you know whether your pages are getting a healthy click-through or not? Google Analytics does help you monitor the rankings and find the average organic CTR pages, but a rank tracker can help you spot organic CTR anomalies such that you can act quickly and achieve the expected market share.
Identify Keyword Relevancy
It was a common practice in the past to focus on positioning a page for a single keyword or two or at most three. Today, a page can rank for multiple phrases and even for keywords that are not even used on the page.
If you take a look at this page ranking data, you will see it is ranking for over 700 keywords.
But if you look closely, some of the keywords it is ranking for are not entirely relevant for the page’s topic. For the overall website, these keywords hold validity but not for the page in particular. This is the reason why pages rank poorer for some keywords.
With keyword tracking data your marketing team can identify new opportunities and create a new piece of content or improve existing content to achieve higher rankings and drive even more relevant traffic to the site.
Data You Can Report On
A key challenge for SEOs is proving a campaign’s success and reporting on metrics. After all, what clients care about is what impact your services had on the company’s bottom line.
An effective way to show the improvement is to report the keywords that started ranking since your last report and how much traffic and sales the pages associated with these keywords brought in.
You can also report the performance change over time in terms of rankings improvements, campaign success and even illustrate overall progress over time.
But to deliver such an SEO report you will need the keyword tracking data.
Identify Low-Hanging Fruit Opportunities
It is known that many SEO strategies take time to bear fruit, and in 2022 it is imminent to discover opportunities that can rank you faster and better.
Keyword ranking data can help you identify opportunities that can maximize the investment and deliver results faster. For example, such data can reveal keywords and phrases whose rankings you could improve quickly, doubling or tripling the traffic they bring in.
Such an approach can immediately increase the impact on the company’s traffic. However, as we mentioned for doing so you will need consistent and reliable keyword ranking data.
Too long; didn’t read?
Here’s the infographic encapsulating this entire post.
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SERP is constantly evolving and search engines are adding new schemas such as feature snippers and QA boxes. Rank tracking can help you not only solidify your existing presence in SERPs but also help you discover opportunities and troubleshoot problems and fix issues immediately as the reasons above elaborate.
