Keyword Monitoring: Expert Hacks That Bring Results

Keywords lie at the core of search engine optimization, letting you indicate to search engine bots and users alike that the content you deliver is relevant to users’ requests. Yet, simply finding relevant queries and integrating them into your content is not enough to attain SEO success. To reach this goal, you need to ensure that your site appears right at the top of SERPs for your target search terms.

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Tracking Keywords: What Does It Mean and Why Should You Care?

Keyword tracking is an ongoing procedure of tracking the positions your site takes in search engine result pages (SERPs) for specific search queries. Since high positions in SERPs are the ultimate objective of search engine optimization, your rankings for specific queries are among the most pivotal SEO performance metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of your strategy and hint at possible errors or gaps.

All in all, keeping an eye on and analyzing this metric can give you a tangible competitive advantage and help you achieve your goals faster and easier. And though the process of keyword monitoring can sound somewhat daunting, it doesn’t have to be complicated. 

These days, there are plenty of solutions that can help you handle this task without a hassle. Read expert reviews of popular SEO tools to explore existing solutions and pick the one that works for you. Continue reading to learn how to track keywords effectively.

Importance of Keyword Ranking Analysis

Keyword ranking analysis has multiple purposes. Namely, here are the primary benefits that should encourage you to make it an integral part of your tactic:

• Performance measurement - Keeping an eye on this metric can help you see what your target audience is searching for and how well your website meets their needs. In the long run, this will let you visualize how your positions change over time and fine-tune your tactic to get in front of more potential customers.
• Competitive analysis - By watching your competitors’ keyword rankings, you can see which queries bring your rivals the highest positions and website traffic. This will enable you to outperform the competitors, close the gap in your approach, and identify top-performing searches.
• Trend identification - Many SEO performance tools will let you see how your positions for different queries change in a graph. Such visualization can help you understand the trends for the rise and fall of specific queries in SERPs and adjust your tactic accordingly.
• Content optimization - By keeping an eye on your positions for specific queries, you can see which queries work best for you and prioritize them in your content strategy. As a result, you can gain more exposure and traffic.

How Does SEO Keyword Tracking Work?

In order to understand how to track this metric, you may want to understand how it works from the inside.

So how do I get keyword rankings, you may wonder? 

1. Crawling and indexing. Once you publish your optimized content, search engine bots will crawl the known URLs to collect detailed data from your pages. The bots will also follow internal links on your site to identify other pages. The information crawlers collect includes content structure, metadata, and search terms. The following indexing process includes assessing the relevance and context of each page’s content based on used queries, as well as measuring other ranking factors, such as page speed, user experience, and mobile-friendliness. This research helps search engines choose the most relevant sites to display in SERPs.
2. Rank checking. After search engine bots crawl, index, and rank your pages, you can use specialized tools to monitor which positions your site holds for your target queries. These tools check multiple search engines and collect data about your positions from them to deliver comprehensive insights to you. This information can then be used to assess your strategy, find trends and patterns, and enhance your keyword rankings in the long-term perspective.
3. Frequency of tracking. Once you set up the process of monitoring, you can use the selected tools to check your insights as frequently as you need. The perfect frequency should be determined based on positions’ fluctuation in your industry. If the fluctuation rate is high, you may want to consider assessing your positions daily to get the most up-to-date info. Otherwise, weekly or monthly monitoring should work.

Setting Up Keyword Tracking

Choosing Terms

Identify the queries you want to monitor. First, conduct keyword research to detect which terms your target readers use to discover content like yours. You can leverage specialized keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to tap into a large amount of queries in no time. 

Additionally, you can use Google Search Autocomplete and Related Searches tabs to find more related queries. And don’t forget to analyze which queries you already rank for and which are used by your competitors to gain deeper insights into your SEO performance.

Identifying Suitable Tools for Keyword Tracking

Explore and compare available tools to select an option that works for your business. A tool with the right functionality and accuracy can help you start tracking keywords and other SEO performance metrics without wasting much time on it. Some examples of tools you may try are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Setting Baseline Metrics

To get a full understanding of your queries’ performance, you need to watch multiple SEO metrics. Some of the core things to keep an eye on include:

• Keyword rankings;
• Organic website traffic is acquired by every search term;
• Search volume;
• Historical data;
• Visibility;
• Bounce rate
• Competition/difficulty.

By watching these metrics, you can determine which results you receive from every target query and tweak your strategy for the best outcomes.

Analyzing the Data

In order to use this metric to improve your strategy, you need to meticulously analyze the results. The specific metrics you will see in your dashboard can vary depending on the selected tool and customized settings. Yet, here are a few things you should pay attention to in order to interpret your insights:

• Position - Check the specific position you take in SERPs for the target query today. Additionally, keep an eye on historical data to see which positions you took before to identify rank change.
• Search volume - Analyze the number of searches people perform for your target query per month. This is a good indicator to predict potential traffic - the higher the volume, the more visitors you can drive.
• Traffic - Check the volume of traffic your site receives from every term and analyze its fluctuations compared to past analyses.
• Click-through rate - CTR demonstrates the number of users who actually click on your link after finding you in SERPs for a relevant query. Typically, the higher positions you take, the higher the CTR.

These and other metrics can help you stay informed about any traffic or ranking fluctuations and identify valuable insights and patterns. These insights should be then used to fine-tune your tactic. For example, if you see a high position but a low CTR, probably, you want to make your meta title and description to encourage more users to visit your site. Or, if you see that your primary target query has a very small search volume, you may want to enhance your strategy with more searched keywords.

Reporting and Monitoring

After you set up everything and start tracking keywords, make it a continuous process. While there is no general rule of thumb on how frequently businesses need to check their positions in SERPs, regularity is always the key to success. Establish regular reporting processes to receive insights into the performance of your target queries at least once or twice a month. This should be enough to track fluctuations and trends and identify areas for improvement.

If you are working in a highly competitive industry or are actively making changes to your site, then you might want to create reports more frequently.

All in all, the success gets down to two primary things:

1. Detecting the right regularity of reporting and monitoring based on your business’ specs and market;
2. Aligning the key metrics you are looking at with the short-term and long-term goals of your business.

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Advanced Keyword Tracking Strategies

If you want to get the most out of your keyword monitoring, there are two advanced techniques to try:

1. Start keeping track of your positions for long-tail queries. These are more specific terms that consist of 3+ words. Although these search terms typically have lower volumes, they also have lower competition. That is, taking high positions for them is easier, while they are linked to higher-intent traffic and tend to have better conversions.
2. Monitor how high you appear in results for local queries (aka in Map results). This will help you gain valuable insights into the performance of your site in terms of Local SEO, which in turn can help you gain even more website traffic and drive foot traffic to your physical locations.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Like other SEO metrics, your positions in SERPs are never 100% static. They can have mild to strong fluctuations, and they are not necessarily bad. The top reasons for this are:

• Significant changes on your site or specific page;

• New pages added to your site;
• Changes on competitors sites;
• Seasonality;
• Changes in user behavior;
• Algorithm updates.

These and other factors can make your position degrade or improve. The solution? - If we are talking about changes affected by changes in your or your competitors’ site, user behavior, or seasonality, the best way to solve the problem is to track your positions in SERPs along with the overall organic traffic you receive. This can help you identify what causes increases and decreases. An in-depth analysis can help you identify the specific steps you should take to retain or boost your positions.

When it comes to algorithm updates, they can also make your rankings fluctuate. To minimize the negative impact and use every algorithm update to your benefit, you should keep a close look at these changes and promptly adapt to them.

Conclusion

Keyword monitoring is a pivotal SEO practice that holds incredible value for business. With its help, you can learn which queries work best for you, how much traffic they bring, and what other terms your competitors use to drive traffic. Additionally, this process can help you detect patterns and trends that will help you increase your positions in SERPs further, hence increasing your visibility.

After reading this article, you have a comprehensive guide on how to measure the positions your site takes for each target query. Start using these tips now to see greater SEO results in the long run!