Do you track your website's search rankings?
Tracking your rankings in the various search engines helps you to see how your website is performing. It lets you know which areas you're doing well in and where you could improve.
Talking of improvement, that's one of the best reasons for tracking your rankings. Finding and taking advantage of opportunities allows you to make changes to your website that could boost your rankings.
If you've worked with an SEO company previously, they almost certainly would've sent you some ranking reports to show you how your website was doing in the search engines. If they excelled at what they promised to do for your business, then you would've seen some positive ranking changes and more traffic to your website.
However, even if you are working with an external company, it's still important that you know how to check your own website rankings. This can be helpful if you ever have a query with a report that you've been sent and you want to double-check the data.
The first thing you need when you want to track your website rankings is a list of keywords. These are the words or phrases that you're trying to make your website visible for in the search engines. For example: "plumber in [New York]" or "blackout curtains".
As a quick note, these keywords will mostly be the same ones you were targeting when you created your content. You can of course always add new keywords, but if you haven't created content for them, you might struggle to find your website ranking for them.
There are two ways that you can check your website rankings. You can do it manually or you can use a software tool.
The manual method is free but will require your time. You'll be manually performing a search in Google or Bing and then noting down where your website appears.
When carrying out manual searches you should make sure you're using an incognito window in your browser. This ensures you're logged out from any accounts and your own search history doesn't affect the results data.
Look through the first 10 pages of results for each keyword and note the position your website appears in (if it appears). As an example, Google has 10 results per page. So if you were in the 4th position on page 3, that would be position 34.
Any results that are outside the top 10 will not be on the first page of Google. So these keywords will be ones that you'll want to focus your attention on, to try and improve your rankings.
If you're someone that values your time, then the manual method won't be for you. The good news is that there are plenty of software tools that have been designed to track your website rankings, doing the hard work for you.
One of my favourite tools is SerpFox (link: https://serpfox.com/). It's a paid tool that is available for the same price as a couple of coffees per month.
SerpFox will automatically track your keywords for you on a regular basis. You can schedule PDF reports to be sent to you via email on an on-going basis. You can even set up notifications. This is a great way to be notified when you appear in the top 10 results for one of your keywords, as just one example.
There are plenty of other tools available too, so if you prefer another option that's absolutely fine.
The most important thing is that you are tracking this data. It helps you and your team to ensure that your website is performing well in the search engines and ultimately to bring more visitors to your site.
P.S. If you'd like to talk more about how your website can be more visible in the search engines, please schedule a call with me. You can book a call at a time and date that suits you on my calendar here. Book a meeting with me.
