To improve the efficiency of your SEO efforts, you need to know how to check your SEO ranking. Believe it or not, this process is much more complex than just checking your page position by running a quick Google search.
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In this guide, you’ll learn how to track SEO rankings and set your SEO goals by effectively implementing SEO strategies as well as which metrics to look at when checking your SEO rank. Let’s dive in!
What Is SEO Ranking?
SEO ranking is the primary indicator of your SEO efforts. They refer to your website’s position in SERP (search engine results page) for a specific search term.
Many different factors influence how well a web page ranks on the SERP, including but not limited to its backlink profile, domain authority, content quality, and user experience.
Why Is SEO Ranking Important?
This is probably obvious, but let’s take a look at a quick stat to highlight the importance of SEO ranking.
According to the latest data, ranking #1 of SERP generates around 39.6% of clicks. The second position has a CTR of 18.4%, and the third has 10.1%. So, the top 3 positions in SERP account for ≈ 70% of clicks.
Source: Firstpagesage
Secondly, SEO is a long-term strategy. Tracking your SEO rankings allows you to assess how your efforts and investments are paying off and continuously optimize your results.
Google constantly updates its search engine to better meet the expectations of users. The latest development is the rollout of Helpful Content Update, part of a broader strategy aimed at original and helpful content written for people instead of search engines.
Typically, algorithm changes are impactful enough to cause significant changes in search rankings, and websites can lose traffic and keywords. Besides, Google makes minor tweaks to its algorithm around nine times daily. SEO tracking allows you to anticipate such changes, identify trends, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
SEO monitoring also gives you insight into your realistic goals. For example, imagine you’re targeting a very competitive keyword, say, “CRM software.”
By looking at the SERP overview, you can realistically assess how likely you are to rank for the given keyword based on the average domain rating (DR) and the quantity and quality of referring domains.
Naturally, there’s no point chasing the dragon, and you should focus your efforts on less competitive broad match and long-tail keywords.
By looking at the top-performing pages for the desired keyword, you can optimize your content to match the search intent better, that is, addressing the things people expect to see. What is the length of their content? What modifiers are they using in the titles? What is the angle of their articles?
By evaluating your competitors’ content, you can address inconsistencies of your own.
How to Set Up Your SEO Goals?
Before learning how to check your SEO ranking, it’s crucial to set up your SEO goals. These are clear and measurable objectives you aim to achieve in a specific time. Unless you know your goals, your strategy won’t work.
To complement your SEO endeavors, tracking and monitoring your rankings is crucial. The insightful article provides valuable guidance on tracking SEO rankings. By combining the expertise of link-building services with the knowledge shared in this informative piece, you can develop a comprehensive approach to improving your website’s visibility and staying on top of your SEO game.
Below is a good framework to help you set up your SEO goals.
You need to start by:
- Creating an outcome goal. This will be the ultimate goal of your project and the timeframe you’re setting for it. This should be pretty easy, as you probably know what you want to achieve. Remember, it has to be an achievable goal. For example, you want to rank in the top 3 results for a keyword that has a keyword with high business potential in 6 months.
- Setting your performance goals. These are smaller milestones that will help you map out the road to your ultimate goal. Building on our outcome goal, this could be estimating how many backlinks you need to get from high-quality referring domains in these 6 months.
- Setting your process goals. These are even smaller milestones that will build into your performance goals and are 100% within your control. For example, you need to send out X outreach emails to get X high-quality backlinks. Or, you can create a lead magnet such as a free tool, white paper, or original resource to get backlinks organically. Depending on your strategy, process goals can be adjusted for your needs.
To ease out the process of setting your SEO goals, consider these 3 things:
Industry benchmarks
Not all of your SEO KPIs will have a benchmark. Usually, average session duration and average bounce rate are the two metrics that can be set by looking at your industry.
For the rest of your goals, you need to use reasonable judgment and set a timeframe in which they must be reached.
Identify your competitors and, with the help of Google scraping techniques start tracking their progress on search. How many keywords are they ranking for in the top 3 positions? How many high-quality referring domains are linking to them? What are their top pages?
Make notes of all these things and apply insights to your own SEO optimizations.
Organic search competitors vs. business competitors
Understanding competition is arguably the most crucial step in setting your SEO goals. Unless you have SEO knowledge, you may mistakenly think that it’s your direct business competitors who you need to be outranking on search. However, it isn’t always the case.
Your business competitors may be part of your organic competitors, but your organic competitors might not always be business competitors.
The bottom line is that you must weigh principles like traffic potential and business value. Indeed, outranking your direct competitors is important, but you also need to think about how you will outrank your organic search competitors so that you’re not losing a good chunk of organic traffic.
Realistic keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty, also known as SEO difficulty, is a metric available in most SEO tools to determine how difficult it is to rank for this keyword in Google’s organic search.
For example, according to Ahrefs, we’d need to get backlinks from roughly 2185 domains to rank in the top 10 for the keyword “SEO.”
Is this an achievable goal? Maybe. But how long will it take you to get there?
Your goals have to be time-bound and realistic. Generally speaking, you should go after keywords where your website’s domain rating is in the same ballpark range as the top-ranking pages.
To determine how likely you are to rank for a specific keyword, you need to assess the top pages ranking for this keyword based on:
- Domain (website) authority
- The number of websites that are linking to the page (referring domains)
- Topical authority
- Search intent
What SEO Metrics Should You Track, and Why?
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is arguably the most critical SEO KPI because it measures visitors that come to your site through non-paid search engine results.
No matter what kind of marketing initiative you’re running, growing your organic traffic should be one of your primary SEO goals. The reasons are many, but primarily, organic traffic is the most affordable and scalable way to bring new customers to your business. Growing this number requires a careful combination of great content and SEO best practices and in most cases, it takes a few months to start seeing any results.
If you’re already getting some organic traffic to your website, make sure to separate branded and non-branded traffic. Basic (and free) tools such as Google Analytics can give you a good rundown of what pages on your website are driving results.
There is no benchmark as to how much monthly organic traffic is good. It will depend on your internal resources, your SEO knowledge, how many times per week you blog, among other things.
Your organic traffic directly impacts your rankings, considering that more than 75% of users don’t move past the first page of search engine results.
Keyword rankings
Tracking your keyword rankings provides you with information about the top positions for targeted keywords your web page ranks for.
You need to target the right keywords, that is, keywords that have business potential.
SEO tracking tools and software automate this process by giving you an overview of all keywords you’re ranking for in one place. With every Google update and the amount of content released on the web daily, your keyword rankings can change in the blink of an eye.
You’ll be the first to see and tweak your strategy accordingly when that happens.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page and not taking further action like commenting or clicking the CTA button. Bounce rate heavily depends on your industry, so setting your benchmark somewhere in the middle of your business category would be a good place to start.
Although you want to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean your content is bad. For example, it’s normal for article-focused pages to have a high bounce rate (65%-90%) because users typically leave the page after finding the information they need.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the top 3 ranking factors. Search engines use them to determine “a value” of a page by looking at the quality and quantity of pages that link to it.
There are many ways for website owners to earn backlinks, such as reciprocal links, email outreach, and organic link-building.
By analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, you can build an SEO plan at what content you need to create and what link-building strategy you need to employ. Pay attention to:
- Total number of backlinks
- Domain Rating (DR) of referring domains
- Relevancy of links
Note that there is no easy way to earn backlinks. Focus on quality over quantity and set a goal amount of backlinks from high-quality referring domains you aim to achieve. Links from low-authority and spammy websites can even hurt your rankings in the long run.
CTR
Click-through rate (CTR) measures how often people click on your page from search results. The organic CTR rate is heavily dependent on your position in SERP. In fact, a study shows that the first position of Google’s search results accounts for 43.32% and is 10 times more likely to be clicked on than the 10th position.
Source: Clictadigital
Tracking CTR is essential for website owners. CTR can be influenced by a catchy SEO title and engaging meta description.
In the same realm, a good CTR and a high bounce rate can signal that your page doesn’t nail the search intent, meaning users don’t find the complete or necessary information in your content.
Site speed
Search engines prioritize pages that load fast. Period.
Page speed became even more crucial with Google’s shift to user experience as a ranking factor known as Page Experience update (commonly referred to as Core Web Vitals).
As a rule of thumb, a page load time of 1-2 seconds is a good benchmark.
By monitoring your bounce rate together with Core Web Vitals, you can gain actionable insights into what needs to be improved and enhanced to deliver a better UX to your site visitors.
Search visibility
Search visibility is the percentage of clicks a webpage gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords. For example, if a keyword “content personalization” that you’re ranking for gets searched 500 times, and your page gets 50 clicks, your search visibility for that keyword is 10%.
Search visibility is a more advanced SEO metric and is measured through SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush.
In the example below, we did a quick search for the “content personalization” keyword in Ahrefs. However, it’s advised to first compile a list of all keywords relevant to your business and go from there.
To check your visibility for a specific keyword, go to Keyword Explorer → Traffic share → By domains. You’ll see an overview of competitors with the most search traffic based on keyword input.
To improve search visibility, you first need to appear high on the SERPs. You can also leverage internal linking to link from one page on your website to another to improve the search visibility of pages they link to and pass link authority.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that convert out of all site visitors. Conversion can mean many things depending on your goals, such as making a purchase, signing up for a subscription, submitting a lead gen form, and the like.
Conversion rate can be checked in Google Analytics. However, you have to be careful because Google Analytics measures the overall conversion rate based on all goals you have set up, which don’t represent equal value to the website owners.
To improve conversion rate, improve the loading speed of your website, create valuable content, highlight your value proposition, and work on your CTAs (call to action).
How to Track Your SEO Ranking?
There are various SEO tools to monitor your SEO performance, but the three most important ones are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and more advanced SEO tools like Ahrefs.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is an SEO-focused tool for website owners to see how their site performs on search, and for CEOs to see if their website development costs aren’t worthless. It has many useful features like site sitemap submission, crawling and indexing, Core Web Vitals performance, Google Discover traffic, and much more.
The most important metrics available in GSC are clicks, impressions (the number of times Google your page was shown in search results), average CTR, and average position.
GSC allows you to check the clicks on impressions for every page within a custom time range.
Another helpful feature is checking the average position change on Google Search Console. To do that, navigate to Search Results and check the Average Position box. Set the comparison time range and switch the view to Pages.
Unfortunately, there is no way to compare your page against your competitors in GSC. However, the data for your page is generally the most precise.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another valuable asset for your digital marketing strategy. From Google Analytics, you can track the customer journey from the moment they land on your site. Most importantly for SEO, the tool lets you see where your traffic comes from and how people interact with your pages.
By navigating to Site Content → All Pages, you can check how each of your pages performs in terms of page views, average session duration, bounce rate, and more.
If you connect your Google Analytics property with your Google Search Console account, you can get even more actionable insights through the Google Search Insights tool.
Navigating Google Analytics takes some practice and knowledge, which doesn’t make it the easiest tool to track SEO progress. However, it can certainly help you identify the main pain points to improve your strategy.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a paid SEO tool for keyword research, backlink checking, and finding link-building opportunities. The tool has a pro version which starts at €89/month and goes up to €899/month for large enterprises.
However, suppose you’re not yet ready to invest in a professional SEO tool. In that case, the Ahrefs team also offers a bunch of free tools, including the most important metrics such as keyword generation, keyword rank checker, keyword difficulty checker, and more.
SEO opportunities within Ahrefs Keyword Explorer are endless. From here, you can pull out your website ranking report, check your overall SEO progress, make a list of keywords and track them, find keyword ideas relevant to your business, research your competitors and their backlink profiles, and perform a content gap analysis to find common keywords that the top pages are ranking for and your page isn’t.
Another great feature of Ahrefs is the website SEO audit. It’s basically an overview of your site’s health which identifies the main culprits that hurt your technical SEO performance and gives you tips to fix them.
Final Words
Remember, understanding and tracking SEO rankings is crucial for the success of your business. Google, along with other search engines, wants to rank pages from authoritative sources with high-quality content, which goes beyond domain ratings.
If your website is equally or more authoritative than the top-ranking pages it competes against, it has a good chance of scoring the top point on search. But even a website with a lower domain rating can outrank a website with a higher domain rating if it has more expertise on the subject.
As hard as it sounds, creating high-quality content is the only bulletproof strategy to rank high on search engines, so consider this your number one priority.
Frequently Asked Questions
The easiest way to identify leads coming from organic search is by looking at Google Analytics reports. First, navigate to Acquisition → Overview. From here, you can see the share of your organic traffic compared to other traffic sources like direct. You can also navigate to Acquisition → All Traffic → Source/Medium to see where your traffic originates from (e.g., Google, Bing).
Branded traffic is the traffic that contains your company name in the search query. It's also sometimes referred to as direct traffic, as searching for the company name is the easiest way to arrive on a website directly.
For many companies, brand awareness is a key KPI and is directly related to SEO efforts. Therefore you should know how to measure it.
You can track this metric with the help of Google Search Console (GSC):
- From the Performance → Search results, add all keywords associated with your brand name (including misspelled ones) to the GSC filter.
- Evaluate how many people are looking for your company directly and compare it against your benchmarks. Track how the total number of clicks and impressions is changing over time.
If you want some more functionality that free Google tools offer, investing in SEO software is a good idea. However, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of SEO tools available on the market.
Ultimately, the choice of SEO software will depend on your goals, budget, and UX/UI preferences. At the very minimum, an SEO tracking tool should have a rank tracking feature, an on-page SEO audit, competitor analysis, and a keyword research/generator tool. Some leading examples include Ahrefs, SEMRush, MOZ Pro, SE Ranking, GrowthBar, and others.
The pricing for SEO software can set you back at $50-150 a month, depending on the package you'll go for. As mentioned, to find the right SEO tool for your business, you must weigh your preferences and goals to pick the best tool that suits your needs.
Passionate Digital Marketer & Software Analyst. I recognize the importance of interactive engagement in today’s world and works towards building a steady flow of relevant, user-oriented content to obtain high-rank placement in search engine results.
