It’s a common misconception that rank tracking only provides keyword rankings. The truth is that it does so much more. We will examine the benefits of rank tracking and how it can be used to make your site more successful.
Assist in validating your strategy
Monitoring your keyword rankings frequently helps you to improve your SEO strategy. An SEO strategy includes keyword research, content creation, optimization, website structure, link building, social signals, crawlability, page load time, website speed, etc. And any change in these signals can affect your ranking.
For example, you can test how more content around the keyword affects ranking. Try adding more subtopics and see if your ranking for your main keyword improves.
In addition, you can check if your content readability can be improved and how that affects your ranking.
Also, when changing the internal linking, you should closely monitor the ranking to avoid any nasty surprises here.
Identify competitors with strongly increased rankings
The SEO landscape is constantly changing, so keeping an eye on your competitors is essential for staying up to date on the latest developments.
Consider checking why your competitors’ rankings improved over time if they showed notable improvements.
Possible reasons could be:
- Improved Content
- Aggressive Link-Building
- Successful social media campaign
- Changes in internal linking
Once you have found the reason, you can check if the same strategy would benefit you.
Your competitors can use different approaches to get to or stay at the top of search results. For example, significant changes in the search result ranking might indicate that the competitor is publishing relevant content more often and has gained authority in the niche. On the other hand, it could also mean that they are tweaking the old content.
Link building is a crucial part of SEO. Therefore, it is quite possible that unusual changes in keyword positions are due to the aggressive link-building approach of our competitors, or it could be the result of an impressive number of social signals.
Moz published a case study that discussed how an unusual number of retweets helped the recently published content get into the top 10.
In short, keyword tracking allows us to watch competitors and follow their changes in the ranking. We become aware of unusual changes in search results and can investigate them further.
Helps you troubleshoot traffic drops
Many factors could cause a sudden drop in organic traffic on a site. Search engines update their algorithms regularly.
In fact, Google made 4500+ changes in 2020 alone.
As we track the keyword positions regularly, we can detect the ranking loss in time. At this point, we can check if the change is limited to specific pages or keywords or if the entire website is affected.
If there are changes among competitors at the same time, it might be an indication of an algorithm update.
When only our site is affected by the change, it will be helpful to find out how the issue can be resolved.
Create ranking reports for your clients
Keyword rank reports are helpful for our clients because they provide an overview of the performance of their SEO strategies. They also offer insights on how to optimize SEO tactics to improve rankings.
Keyword rank reports provide an overview of how a page performs in organic search. The client can monitor the progress of his SEO strategy and determine which keywords are performing well and which need improvement.
Apply low haging fruits strategy
A low-hanging fruit strategy is easy to implement and can boost your organic rankings. The most common low-hanging fruit keywords are words with a high volume that you already have on your site without having blog articles targeting these specific keywords.
This is a very typical situation for many small organizations or blogs. They may rank for keywords without having any blog posts on those words and phrases because they don’t have the time or resources to create content about them.
There are many ways you can proceed when there’s low-hanging fruit on your website.
Writing more articles about these topics would be one way to accomplish this. Another option is to include relevant information as part of an existing article that already ranks well. Include these hanging fruit keywords in your rank tracker and watch your rankings rise. These keywords are also called “low-hanging fruit” because they’re quick and easy to rank for instead of the more competitive terms.
Identify and understand keyword volatility
Tracking keyword rankings allows you to see how search engine rankings fluctuate over time. Whenever brand-new content is published, keyword rankings tend to fluctuate. However, the fluctuation should stabilize after 1-2 months.
If this is not the case, Google might have difficulty understanding the purpose of your page. The solution to this problem is quite simple: improve the relevant sections on your page and make those rankings as stable as possible.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you create multiple pages for the same keyword and don’t get ranked. It’s possible to get higher on Google’s SERPs by having a single page targeting a given keyword. However, if you have two or more pages targeting the same keyword, it becomes difficult to rank high on Google’s SERPs due to the competition.
Tracking keyword rank helps eliminate keyword cannibalization by showing which keywords perform well and which ones don’t. If keywords are performing well, you should use them more often to increase valuable organic traffic.
One of Diggity Marketing’s clients’ websites was penalized by Google. It had keyword cannibalization issues on the page they wanted to rank. They deoptimized the conflicting page and used updated meta tags to re-target both pages to rectify this. After the fix, their targeted main page jumped 20 positions and moved from the 2nd page to the 1st.
In another case study, the Smash Digital team analyzed a website in the medical niche. It was targeting the same keywords on two different pages. So they merged the page with low keyword positions with the page with high keyword positions. As a result, the redesigned page gained the top positions in the SERPs.
Keep a historical record
Through regular keyword tracking, it is possible to record a ranking history. Identifying long-term changes will help you re-evaluate your strategies and identify new possibilities for future campaigns. You can also use it to impress your clients by showing their progress.
Test SERPtimizer’s keyword rank tracker
SERPtimizer’s keyword rank tracking tool allows you to track your keyword positions in Google, Yahoo and Bing, and also provides you with a lot of other useful information. You get a historical record for each keyword you track and you can identify any keyword volatility.