What Does Keyword Rank Tracking Mean in 2024?

Every SEO knows what “keyword ranking” is. We are measured by it, we incorporate it into our strategies and predictions, and we even use it in our day-to-day work to analyze our efforts and SEO strategy success. However, how many of us properly track our rankings across the relevant search engines?

Now, you could just type your top keyword into Google and see where your page URL shows up – if it shows up. But for proper SEO rank tracking over time, the browser isn’t enough. You need exact settings of location, device, and search engine to correctly determine your ranking performance. This is why, if you have a website with multiple pages (or languages) and prefer efficiency, you’ll let a rank-tracking tool get the information for you.

But just how much information do you get from your tool? And do you leverage it to the fullest?

In this article, I’ll show you what rank tracking is, give you my take on the future of keyword tracking in the ever-evolving SERP, and share some tracking strategies and routines. So, read carefully, cause you’ll learn some unique features.

What does it mean to rank for a keyword?

That sounds like a trivial question. We’ll answer it because it’s critical to clarify what the keyword rank can and can’t tell you and why you need to keep track of it. It’ll be easier to grasp how to track keyword ranking when you understand that.

The higher your page ranks on the search engine results page (SERP), the better the chances of being seen by a larger audience and getting clicks. In other words, a high keyword ranking means success. At least, that’s the theory.

If you’ve been in the business of trying to rank on Google and getting traffic for a while, you know there’s more to it. The competition for the top ranks is fierce, and no position is guaranteed.

Your competition is continuously optimizing and trying to snatch the best positions. You need to be aware of competitors who could push you off your rank, and monitor your own content to avoid keyword cannibalization.

Another factor that influences your SEO is zero-click searches which can mess up your SEO strategy. And we haven’t mentioned the bundle of SERP features that can take up the entire space above the fold and keep visitors from seeing your high-ranking page.

So what does all this mean? A high ranking tells you that you convinced Google you have something valuable to offer to a specific audience. To ensure visibility (and CTR), you need to do a little more, and rank tracking can help you.

What is rank tracking?

Keyword rank tracking is the regular monitoring of how your website pages rank for their targeted keywords on the SERPs (search engine results pages).

As an SEO professional, you’ll have a list of keywords that you want different pages to rank for, and you’ll want to track them across several search engines. You’ll keep a close eye on your most relevant pages and keep optimizing them by modifying and updating content and adding pages targeting additional keywords.

Many SEOs find great value in the ability to analyze keywords’ progress and watch daily, weekly, or monthly ranking over time to understand the entire page and entire website performance in SERP.

It doesn’t stop there; keyword rank tracking also includes monitoring your competitors’ ranking and keeping an eye on the changes on the results pages. You want to know if a search query generated a “people also ask” feature or if anyone managed to get a featured snippet, knowledge graph, or any other SERP feature for their content.

If yes, it’s still a question of whether that’s a one-time success or a stable position. In the following paragraphs, you will discover how tracking provides the answers to these questions.

Does keyword ranking still matter?

That’s the latest trend in SEO debates, isn’t it?. How much impact do keywords still have? And how important is keyword tracking and ranking?

With NLP in SERP, E-A-T factors, semantics, and search intent gaining significance, and not to forget the latest helpful content update on Google, these are legitimate questions.

If you ask me, the answer is clear: rank tracking is crucial for long-term growth in SEO. Even though the SERP has changed a lot, the results are still driven by word searches.

It’s true, gone are the days when we had 10 link results in SERP – remember that? The result pages are way more complex today and SEOs have to consider many more factors for valuable ranking to gain actual traffic.

A look at a common SERP from 2010 vs. 2022 shows the shift away from pure keyword-focused SEO.

Let’s play a little “find the differences”, shall we?

SERP from 2010

SERP from 2022

You can see, not even the Google logo is the same.

Paid ads or product images appear above the highest-ranking organic page. For small businesses, local SEO carries more weight than keywords, and there are many other possibilities to make it to the top of a results page.

And this is looking only at results for desktop searches. SERP features on mobile are yet another, completely different story. Appearing at the top of a results page on mobile is a lot more challenging because features are stacked on top of each other and displayed on a tiny screen.

To get to the bottom of it, keyword research has become more elaborate but is only one of many elements that make up an SEO strategy. For rank tracking purposes, keywords are still essential in evaluating SEO performance. The question is how to track ranking with insightful results and how to look at keywords. You’re about to find out.

Sophisticated rank tracker tools also track SERP changes, features and other factors. Still, these elements stand in relation to tracked keywords. For example, the keyword “how to bake a cake” might have a video carousel as a feature.

Why is it important to track your website’s ranking over time?

SEO is a long-term journey. Even with the focus taken off the actual keywords, you still need to monitor for which searches your pages are shown and where they rank. Let’s recap quickly how you get to a high ranking these days and then understand how to hold on to that.

To improve the chances of a high ranking, you must first position yourself as a professional in your field and establish your website authority. For Google to recognize your area of expertise, you need to use the right language, which means relevant keywords. There’s no way around keywords. They are the basis for optimizing and adding more content around the relevant topic or concept.

Why is it necessary to build authority? Because ranking also depends on the traffic and engagement your page receives based on a keyword query. Google wants to be sure visitors get what they came for when they reach your site after searching a specific keyword.

Whether you can hold on to a top position depends on how much real value and relevance you provide to the reader – and keep providing over time. Another thing that impacts your rankings is the competition’s SEO activities.

This means you need to make sure you are aware of all the aspects of your keywords’ visibility over time to make sure you are gaining on your competitors. It goes from your basic SERP ranking to SERP features, performance in different search engines, and even traffic share if you can.

You want to be able to see it all over time, to compare and analyze it to get the most efficient action items.

7 keyword rank tracking benefits

1. Monitor performance
   The primary purpose and benefit is keeping track of SEO performance. You’ll quickly grasp what’s working and what isn’t. Identify the keywords to focus on in your SEO strategy and adjust if necessary. Check out our five ways to hack SEO.
2. Continuously optimize
   Rank tracking allows you to find the areas you need to improve or fine-tune your SEO strategy. Getting to the top positions on the SERP is a long-term effort, and keeping taps on the popular pages is critical. Sometimes minor changes can make a difference.
3. Quickly identify issues such as instability in ranking or cannibalization.
   Detect when a page suddenly drops from a stable position. The sooner you get wind of these, the earlier you can uncover and fix the issue to ensure you’re not losing traffic.
4. Benchmark to position yourself among the competition.
   Using SERP tracking, you can keep an eye on your competitors’ rankings for the keywords you track. Identify the keywords and pages your top competitors rank high for. You may not need to beat your competition for every keyword, but a selected bunch representing your most substantial areas. Make sure not to neglect the rest, though. You want to stay in the game.
5. Discover opportunities and risks
   Benchmarking your rank against competitors helps you pinpoint new opportunities. If a competitor suddenly surges in rank, find out how they optimized the page or what they changed. What if you did something similar – but better? Monitor fluctuations in ranking compared to your rivals and see which terms they are gaining or losing for.
   Pro tip: Find holes in your or your competitors’ keyword mixes with Similarweb’s Keyword Gap Analytics. Keep an eye on their targeted keywords to identify new potential.  
6. Optimize PPC bidding/Avoid PPC cannibalization
   Tracking keyword ranks is not part of a PPC routine. However, I think there’s an excellent opportunity for cooperation between teams here. The PPC manager can benefit from being aware of SEO ranking. It enables teams to adjust their campaigns to avoid cannibalization and compensate for lack of visibility when organic rank is low.. “Double bidding” with SEO and PPC can easily lead to a low ROI (Return on Investment) or even a loss of money, and this can be easily aligned by tracking.
7. Compare ranking vs. traffic
   High ranking is not necessarily a guarantee for high volume or high-value traffic. That’s why monitoring clicks together with the ranking position is essential. Assess if you are getting the amount of traffic you expect from a top SERP rank. If not, investigate why.
   Also, pages that rank in a slightly lower position but get more clicks may be more valuable for your business, and you want to concentrate on keeping them optimized.

Establish a rank-tracking routine

If you want to get maximum value from tracking the ranking of your top keywords, you need to build a routine.

What and how you track depends on the goals you set in your SEO strategy and specific objectives for targeted keywords.

Let’s say you identified a keyword gap and created content targeting the missing keywords. You now need to monitor and track the performance of the new pages. Check the position and benchmark against the competition. You want to see your graph going up. To ensure you’re not doing this in vain, monitor the clicks you and the relevant competitors are getting.

Here’s another example: you want to boost your video marketing and have invested a lot of effort into video SEO, targeting top keywords. Your goal is to get your video featured on the SERP. Check if there are videos that continuously reach a high ranking and which videos Google keeps switching around. See what they have in common to learn how to get to the top ranks. Also, see why Google removed a video and learn what you can do better with your own.

Why should you do rank tracking with Similarweb?

Let’s cut to the chase: How does keyword rank-checking work? To get optimal results and meet the goals of your marketing strategy, you want to use an excellent rank-tracking tool.

Here’s a little secret: That’s what I did at Similarweb. And guess what? We were so blown away by the enormous value of keyword research that we acquired Rank Ranger and added the tracker to the toolbox we offer our clients. You can access the functionalities through the Similarweb API.

With the Similarweb rank tracking tool, you can deep-dive into the data related to keyword rank tracking. It lets you monitor your website’s ranking for multiple keywords, quickly identify opportunities and risks, and easily evaluate performance. You get intuitive visualizations like heat maps and graphs you can open and close inside a report.

We were especially impressed with the unique tracking capabilities, and the scope and granularity of data, which fits right into the Similarweb concept.

Let’s look at some of Similarweb’s useful features:

Rank Tracking Dashboard

The SEO dashboard gives you a complete ranking overview. Here you can see all your keywords’ performances, and start digging into specific groups or pages by using the filtering options. When entering the keywords you want to zero in on, you get a list of all your URLs that rank for the terms. The list includes position, traffic volume, periodic fluctuation, and SERP features.

You can then hone in on the top-ranking keywords to ensure they are stable, or you could focus on the ones that show up on the second page and investigate how to optimize them to get to the top page. Simply filter according to rank.

SEO Monitor

You can check the ranking graph in the SEO monitor to dig deeper into the data for a specific keyword. You’ll see your selected keyword ranking over the past thirty days in the SERP. Below the ranking graph, you’ll find the SERP Snapshot, showing actual results from SERP.

What does that mean? This tool shows you the charts for all other pages that ranked for the keyword in the last month. You can clearly see who’s gaining, losing, or messing up the SERP order. You can remove irrelevant competitors and concentrate on the most relevant competition for each keyword.

The ranking landscape for “web extensions” is pretty stable at the top, but quite erratic in the lower ranks (typical).

Above the fold

This is often ignored when tracking ranks. SEOs are happy to appear on a high rank but remain unaware that unless the visitor scrolls down, they don’t see the result.

On SERPs with many PPC ads or SERP features, the top-ranking organic pages can easily drop below the fold. In this case, focusing on being above the fold may be more relevant than reaching a specific ranking position.

SERP features

There are x different SERP features that Google uses to display content. However, a page may get featured in one of the particular display options for a week and then disappear. With Similarweb, you can track the continuity of the ranking because you get to see results for an entire month.

The tool lets you examine a specific SERP feature and see which content from which page URL was chosen. Find the ones that remain over time and learn what they do well, or see the ones that didn’t manage to hold on to the feature and see how you can do better.

Stable vs. unstable ranking

The goal is to hold on to a good position that brings you a lot of traffic, conversions, or even sales. Use the rank tracking graphs to identify any drop or fluctuation in your ranking easily. This could be a sign of an issue with a page. Also, clearly see the impact of any Google update on a keyword’s ranking landscape.

Cannibalization

One of the issues that could impact a stable ranking is cannibalization or duplicate content. You don’t have to dig around to find out what it is when you use Similarweb, because this is one of their unique features – the tool finds cannibalization issues for you.

Create rank-tracking dashboards with Similarweb

This is one of my personal favorites – You can build rank-tracking dashboards to help you with a smooth routine. Decide which keywords are most relevant for you to track and add them to the dashboard. The tool does the tracking for you and provides you daily with fresh, comprehensive data.

Also, a dashboard lets you focus on what matters most. For example, if you want to see ranking on a specific search engine only (i.e., YouTube for video), you can set the dashboard up accordingly.

Monitor competitor sites and see how they rank for the same keyword. Quickly identify when a competitor gains visibility and could become a threat to your position. The dashboard is the tool that enables your tracking routine and goals.

For my routine at Similarweb, I built a dashboard that includes the rankings of our top competitors for each keyword group. I can easily review groups and sub-groups of keywords, and their performance over time vs my main competitors. This is what it looks like for one of our niches (poor Alexa):

Final thoughts

You got my point, right? A good rank tracker tool does the tracking for you so you can analyze performance and optimize your content.

There’s one more thing to remember, and that’s the data. What we love about Similarweb is the scope and the granularity of data they provide. Because, as an SEO, your work can only be as good as the data it builds on.

FAQs

What is keyword rank tracking?

Keyword rank tracking is the practice of regularly monitoring your website’s ranking on the SERP for a set of targeted keywords.

Why is keyword rank tracking important?

Keyword rank tracking lets you monitor the progress of your keyword strategy and evaluate its success over time. You can also benchmark against the competition and identify opportunities and risks.

How to do rank tracking? 

To do rank tracking effectively, you need a proper rank-tracking tool. The software should do the monitoring for you and provide you with a variety of accurate metrics to assess SEO over time.