What Is Keyword Rank Tracking?

Keyword rank tracking is monitoring positions that your website occupies for specific search phrases. You can do it manually by checking the position for each keyword yourself or automatically using a rank tracker tool. Such tool checks the positions each day and saves them so you could inspect them later. Rank checking tools usually present the data in the form of user-friendly charts. Most of them also track your competitors.

Why tracking keyword rankings is important?

First and foremost – it makes you able to see if you are making any progress with your SEO.

Secondly, you can spot low hanging fruits. For example, if your site is just outside the Top10 for a few phrases, you know that those phrases are the ones that will give you the best return on your SEO efforts. Small content update, a little bit of on-page optimization, or a single backlink can push them to the first page and give you more traffic.

Automatic keyword tracking

There are two types of keyword rank trackers.

  • Cloud-based tools.
  • Self-hosted tools.

Cloud-based solutions are very simple. You sign up, enter your website address, add keywords you want to track and that’s it – your keywords are tracked. 

Using self-hosted solutions is much more complex. You need to install the software on your own server, configure, secure, and maintain it on your own. You also need proxy servers to query Google and other search engines effectively. Google doesn’t like automated querying so they will ban your IP very fast if you won’t use proxies. All that makes it hard for non-tech people. On the other hand, if you monitor thousands of keywords every day and have tech stuff on board, self-hosted solution may be much cheaper

Which tool can be used to track organic rankings?

Best cloud-based rank trackers:

MonitLabs – Free tool for up to 25 daily monitored phrases. Higher plans are paid but it is the lowest-priced solution on the market. The tool is simple and gets the job done.

AgencyAnalytics – Rank tracker for SEO/SEM agencies – they have TONS of integrations with all the possible tools your employees may use.

SeoProfiler, SeRanking, RavenTools – All-in-one SEO tools – if you want to have all the possible features in your tool. Very useful and also good for agencies but if you are solo then they are a bit pricey.

SemRush and Ahrefs – Great tools, but not for keyword tracking. Both are expensive and Ahrefs won’t even check your rankings every day.

Best self-hosted rank trackers:

SEO Power Suite – leading self-hosted solution. A free version exists but it is very limited so it is useful mostly for testing the tool. The paid version starts at $299/year.

 Traffic Travis – not as feature-rich as SEO Power Suite but cheaper – $97 one time fee. A limited free version is also available.

Remember – with the self-hosted solution you have to calculate server and proxies costs as well.

Rank tracking accuracy

“Accuracy” of checked positions is one of the most common myths when it comes to keyword tracking software. Each company claims its tool is more “accurate” than the ones from competitors. Most of that is just marketing fluff because there is no such thing as accuracy in the context of tracking positions in search engines.

Many people tend to believe that Google keeps some sort of reference ranking for each keyword. If the tool shows positions that match that reference ranking it means it is accurate. If it differs it is inaccurate.

That is a myth. There is no reference ranking. The ranking is calculated on-the-fly each time you type a query. Well… technically not each time because they surely use caching. But still, not going to deep into technical details, the ranking is dynamic by nature. It is generated when you type a query so there is no point of reference and thus, no accuracy can be measured.

However…

There is a thing called personalization. Google can present different results for the same query depending on browser history, device, language, and location.

In any decent rank tracker, you can explicitly define the last three. The first one – browser history – is a bit more tricky. If Google identified (and they did, believe me!) that you own a certain website, say example.com, they may show you this result higher in the rankings when you are searching for something relevant to topics covered on your website.

Also, when Google notices that you visit any given website more often than other websites they may treat this website in a favorable way while calculating the ranking for your queries.

You want to avoid both of those things to check your rankings in an “accurate” way. Most likely what you have in mind when saying that rankings are accurate is that they are depersonalized. You want to see if others see your site, not you. To achieve that, you can check your positions using private mode in your browser, typing query from the right location and from the right device. And this is, in essence, what all rank trackers do!

Well… maybe not all of them. If the rank tracker uses Google Seach Console data to track your rankings then the reported positions may differ from what you can find using the depersonalized method

Fortunately, most of the rank trackers do not use GSC data to track your rankings. If you can get position reports before you connect your GSC account to your tracker then you can safely assume it tracks positions on its own.

So, unless the rank tracking tool is directly lying to your face by providing fake positions or is messing up basic stuff like cookie and session management – it is “accurate”. I have tested almost 40 rank trackers and all of them were presenting “accurate” results. The results can be a bit different from time to time but it just means Google has not decided yet where you should rank. They are still testing how your site is performing for various queries. How many people click on your result? How long they stay on-site? Do they visit other pages on your website?

Based on this data Google changes your (and others!) positions quite frequently. And rank trackers? They ask Google for rankings and present to you what Google returned. The same what you are doing when trying to assess their “accuracy”.

How many keywords should you track?

If you are creating a blog post then you should target a few keywords around the main topic. How many is a few? It depends on the topic but for most articles targeting anywhere between 2-4 keywords is an optimal choice. You should try not to target only one keyword per article. Usually, there are some other closely-related phrases for each topic. By not optimizing your content for them, you are missing out on additional exposure and traffic.

If your post is big, long, pillar kind of content then you can go for more keywords. The key takeaway is to not overdo it. Your primary focus should be always on user experience.

What if you are a local business and you want to track SEO progress for the homepage of your website? Or a category page on the eCommerce website? The general rule stays the same – a few phrases per page. If you try to push one landing page for a few dozens keywords it is a strong indicator that you have a content management problem. You should split that one landing page into multiple landing pages – each representing content related to a smaller subset of keywords. This way you make your content more relevant and your SEO efforts (link building especially) will not look spammy.

Once you have your desired keywords listed and content is optimized for them then answering the question “how many keywords should I track?” is simple – all of them! If that is not possible then – as many as possible.

And if that is also a problem then maybe it is time to switch to a cheaper rank tracking solution. 😉