Why You Should Track Your Rankings In The Search Engine And How To Do That

You might have heard of maximizing SEO or improving your website’s ranking. As a business owner in 2021, you need to learn the importance of having an online presence and the best way to use that presence to your advantage. It can start with looking at the ranking of your website.

SEO ranking refers to the position your website holds on a search engine result page.

Whenever customers want to look for a product or service, or any kind of information in general, the majority of the time, they will search for it using a search engine. The top three engines used are Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and each one has its unique algorithm that determines the relevance of each webpage based on several different factors.

Content within a webpage is scanned for keywords and keyword combinations as well as backlinks and the structure of the URL, among other things.

Why Should You Care About Your Website’s SEO Ranking?

Now that you know what SEO ranking is, it is integral to understand their importance to truly grasp why tracking them and improving them is essential. Customers always tend to select the option that appears on the top of the search engine results.

Rarely do customers go beyond the first page of a search engine result? This entails that a business can have the best website regarding functionality and presentation, but if it’s not optimized for the search engine, it will not matter at all. Customers will only see a website that is ranked high.

High rankings mean more traffic, and more traffic means more visitors to convert into customers. This way, rankings are directly related to how well a business performs. It is a promotion for the products and services a business sells, which is why maximizing ranking is part of marketing for any organization.

Rankings can change depending upon changes to a website, changes to competitors’ websites or even changes in the way search engines rank websites based on their algorithms. This means tracking rankings is key to always remaining on top of the SEO game and maintain a fair amount of traffic on your website.

So I’ve collected the top reasons to track the positions of your website:

1) Measure the Results of SEO Efforts

When you work on the SEO of your website, you should be aware of which actions bring the results and how your online performance is evolving. Changes of your rankings are the litmus test in this case.

Start tracking your position to analyze the impact of your content marketing and SEO efforts and see the bigger picture.

2) Identify New Opportunities to Rank Higher and Gain More Traffic

Professional rank tracking tools are able to show you the keywords that can bring more traffic to your website. For example, you see that your website has been started to rank for an important target keyword without any extra efforts from your side. Your positions are quite low, but the huge potential is hidden behind that.

So you can analyze that keyword, create a blog post or optimize your web copy for that. Voila! Your positions are increasing and website traffic as well.

3) Be Aware of the Changes and Reasons for Possible Drops of Positions and Traffic

Sudden traffic and position drops are the pain for any website owner or marketer. There can be different reasons for that: update of Google algorithms, penalties, technical glitches, etc. It’s essential to monitor new rankings signals.

To analyze the situation, it’s a good idea to start with reviewing your ranking history. Dynamic data and clear reports will help you to troubleshoot the drops of traffic and positions. Check which keywords or pages were exposed to drops and find out the reasons.

4) Outrank Your Competitors

Modern rank tracking tools allow you not only to get automated alerts but also to track the positions of your competitors. Why is that helpful for you, as a website owner? Tracking of the competitive websites will help you to keep an eye on their changes: it can be a new landing page, updates of blog, etc.

For instance, if you noticed that some competitor outranked you suddenly, you can analyze the changes on a specific webpage and optimize your web copy better to solidify the position.

How to Track Online Rankings?

Fortunately, nowadays you should track the online positions of your website manually, day by day. Instead of that, just use professional rank trackers or SEO toolkits and get automated notifications and updates of changes. To start tracking the rankings, just do keyword research or just upload a ready list of your target keywords to the tool, choose a specific search engine (country, device, etc) and that’s all. As simple as that.

There are plenty of tools, both free and paid. I would recommend trying the following platforms:

• Wincher (free trial, the price starts from 10 EUR/m)
• Google Search Console (free)
• SEMrush (free trial, the price starts from 119$ per month)

Trends of Rank Tracking in 2021

With the dawning of the new year and the continuing spread of a global pandemic, 2021 has only emphasized the importance of SEO ranking. Businesses can no longer ignore the dire need to develop an online presence, given that most people are limited to their homes.

Even in places where stay-at-home orders are not as stringent, individuals are opting to buy online to be on the safe side. Online sales have been recording high since last year and continue to grow. This means more and more businesses jumping on board the e-commerce revolution.

Proper tracking goes beyond simply looking at the SERP (search engine result page). Sure, that is important, but it must be facilitated by other metrics as well to truly see how well a website is performing in terms of sales.

There are several things that you can do to improve your ranking in 2021. There are some important KPI to measure SEO success. But the first step is to track ranking as it tells you exactly where you stand. Tracking should be done periodically; as already mentioned, it is an ever-changing metric.

Tracking should also be focused on. You can track the performance of individual webpages. Some webpages on a website may attract more traffic and improve SEO ranking, while others might be contributing negatively to the website’s overall performance. So being wary of that is important.

Here are some top trends for 2021 that can help you track and keep the ranking of your website high:

Prioritize users

Your customers are the number audience. The website has been developed for them, and this should be reflected in every aspect of the website, from the layout to the ease of use. Use of keywords appropriately and the presence of meta descriptions that are informative and make sense is one way of improving content on the website.

Customer analytics

Keep tabs on customer analytics. This way, you are tracking user behavior, and this can help weed out problems. For example, the website may be getting a high number of hits but has a very low time spent on the website. This indicates that while the website is ranked high on search engine results, it may not be interesting enough to retain users, and this calls for rectifying measures being put in place.

Knowledge graphs

Google and other search engines provide businesses and individuals with their statistics. Social media users and website owners can get access to graphs regarding their performance online. Through this, companies can track their users’ demographics and predict their behavior based on these characteristics.

Conclusion

Tracking the online positions of your website is a necessity for any business with a presence online. Tracking keeps businesses informed and makes them aware of the issues that may be plaguing the website.

Which rank tracker do you use to measure your SEO performance?

Author Bio: Julia is a professional business development manager with proven experience in customer acquisition, strategic partnerships, and outbound marketing. Now she takes care of global marketing and business growth at Wincher, a daily rank tracker.