Where you rank in Google will determine the amount of traffic your website receives. A thorough and accurate Google ranking tracker can tell you where you currently stand on the SERP, as well as where and how you can improve. Our go-to rank tracking tool is Ranking Checker from SE Ranking.
A Quick Introduction to Ranking Checker
SE Ranking’s Google Ranking Tracker offers a powerful way to monitor how well your site is performing in the search engine. It makes it easy to track relevant keywords and understand how they’re ranking across not just Google, but also Yahoo, Bing, and YouTube, for all locations and devices.
Now, what exactly can you do with the Ranking Checker?
- Track the rankings of keywords in Google and other search engines for your own website, clients’ websites, and your competitors.
- Monitor important keyword parameters like search volume, cost per click, the level of competition, SERP features, and other metrics.
- Review the ranking history of a website for certain keywords.
- Analyze the top 100, or even top 200 search results for any given keyword.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, so let’s dive in.
Ranking Checker’s 3 Data View Options
Under SE Ranking’s rank tracker, you’ll find four data view options:
- Summary
- Detailed
- Overall
- Historical Data
Summary gives you a concise overview of your website’s search visibility, average position, top pages, and where your keywords are ranking in the SERPs.
Detailed lets you view data per search engine together with location. Choose any time period and see the keyword rankings for different dates with their dynamics.
Overall lets you view data for all search engines and locations on a single page. This table only shows one date (it can be a day, a month, two months, etc) for each search engine.
Historical Data allows you to compare current results to baseline keyword rankings. You can also monitor their dynamics over a period of time (a day/week/month ago, three months ago, six months ago, etc.).
How to Determine Your Keyword Rankings in Google
Understanding how your keywords are currently ranking will help you determine how to bring more traffic to your website.
The Google ranking tracker in SE Ranking helps you with this through a number of useful features:
Rankings Tables and Charts
The keyword table offers important information like:
- Customizable columns: Click on one to sort data from smallest to largest (or vice versa) and add additional data columns.
- Rankings: This reflects where a keyword currently stands and if it dropped or improved in rankings.
- The URL for each keyword: SE Ranking also tells you when it first detected it.
- A keyword’s performance over time: Click on the keyword to see the graph.
There are also ranking charts, like Average Position, Traffic Forecast, and Search Visibility:
Use these charts under Detailed and Overall to see current data, as well as data for the past week, three months, and six months. Use the charts under Historical Data to see how the metrics have changed from the baseline date to the most current results.
DeepDive into Any Keyword in Google
Find even more detailed information on Google keyword rankings for any city or country. While setting up your project, you can add more countries, cities, nationwide engines to track.
Determine the Google SERP Features for a Keyword
When looking through the table of keywords, click on Columns and select the box next to SERP Features. This will add a new column.
The symbols that appear in this column for a keyword will tell you which SERP feature that keyword currently holds, including:
- Local pack.
- Reviews.
- Site links.
- Videos.
- Top ads.
- Images.
- People also ask.
View Local Rankings
How you’re ranking locally is just as important as (if not more important than) how you’re ranking nation-wide. You know your local SEO is on point if you appear in the Local Pack or Google Maps. First, make sure you’ve turned on “Include Google Local Pack results” in the set-up step. You can choose to track a combination of both the search engine and the specific city during the set-up. This allows you to track rankings locally.
Now, let’s look at an example. This is what we see when we search “bakery Las Vegas”:
We’ve got the map up top and the pack listing below. Since this is featured prominently at the top of page one of Google, any business that makes it into one of these SERP features is in good shape.
With SE Ranking, you can determine if a keyword you care about is occupying a spot in the Local Pack or Google Maps. Now that you have the SERP Features column included, look for the map icon. This represents the Local Pack. If it’s blue, then it means that your website is present in that block.
5 More Features to Help with Your Analysis
There are a few more features within the Ranking Checker you’ll want to know about.
1. Group Keyword Together into Categories
For example, you can mark certain keywords with tags or group them into folders. All you have to do to create a tag is tick the checkbox next to the keyword and then click “Tags.” Create the name for the tag and give it a color.
After doing this, you can then filter your keywords by tags.
2. Add a Target URL for Each Keyword
By “target URL,” we mean what page a keyword will take you to. The reason you should care about this is that if Google is showing a URL that’s different from the one you want to rank, it can hurt your progress. You also want to avoid a single keyword having multiple URLs ranking for it.
Next to the keyword, click the three dots. Then click Target URL to define the page.
3. Analyze Your SERP Competitors
SERP Competitors allows you to track the first 100 search results for a query in any region across Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Additionally, you’re able to view all the ranking changes and their dynamics.
Hover over any keyword and you’ll see a clock icon. This is SERP Competitors. You can also navigate to this page by clicking on My Competitors -> SERP Competitors
Here’s what we’re looking at on the following page. We see the top 100 ranking URLs for this keyword, plus their domain trust, Alexa website ranking, referring domains, and the total number of keywords that URL ranks for. You can choose to see what URLs are ranking in the top100 or switch to the domain mode.
Note that if you want to compare these results over a specific period, you can do so by adjusting the timespan.
4. Recheck the Data Over Time
SE Ranking allows you to manually recheck rankings one time on the day of the scheduled check.
In terms of the search volume of your keywords, this will update once you add a website to the tool. After that, you need to manually update it each month.
You can do this by clicking Recheck Data.
5. Export Your Rankings History
Exporting and downloading your data is helpful if you want to share it with your team or clients.
- Adjust the time period to the desired range using the calendar.
- Optional: Filter out the keywords you want to export data for.
- Click “Export.” You can choose to download the data as a .XLS or .CSV. The latter will be better if you’re exporting data for a longer period of time (a year or more).
How to Use This Data for SEO
By this point, you’ve learned all sorts of unique and powerful ways to collect valuable data from SE Ranking’s Google ranking tracker. Now, what do you do with all of it? Here are a few suggestions.
Forecast How Beneficial a Keyword Might Be for You
Determining which keywords you want to rank for can feel overwhelming. The Google rank tracker helps you pinpoint the positions of keywords and their search volume. This means you can forecast the traffic that certain keywords can potentially bring to your page.
This will help you understand if it is worth the effort to create content and build links around a certain keyword.
Pick the Top Pages to Focus On
While planning your SEO efforts, you’re going to want to pinpoint the specific URLs that you want to rank higher in Google. By setting your Target URLs in SE Ranking, you can focus on flawlessly optimizing those pages and improving elements like:
- The meta-title and meta-description.
- Headings.
- The URL structure.
- Optimized content with appropriate keyword density.
- Images/alt texts.
- Internal and external links.
Monitor Your Competitors More Closely
As you zero in on the keywords and URLs you want to rank higher, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the other pages you’re competing against. Using SE Ranking’s SERP Competitors, you’ll know exactly where you stand in the competition and who you need to focus on outranking.
Wrapping it All Up
If you want to be found in search engines, then it’s necessary to:
- Find the keywords you care about most.
- Determine which URLs they go with best.
- Understand how you’re currently ranking for those keywords.
- Compare your standings to your competitors’.
- Improve your content using these keywords so that you can rise above the competition.
Using SE Ranking’s Google ranking tracker, you can formulate a data-driven SEO plan and come up with practical steps to rise to the top of the search engine.