Tracking Keyword Rankings

Last Updated: May 25, 2021

While keyword tracking isn't strictly a part of keyword research, it helps complete the circle and can inform future keyword research endeavors.

"How am I ranking?" seems like a simple question. Unfortunately, the answer is usually anything but simple.

There are several ways of measuring keyword visibility, each with their own pros and cons. Let's explore each one in turn.

1. Traditional keyword ranking

This is "classic" keyword tracking. It tries to answer the question of keyword performance at an individual level by asking "What's my Google rank?"

The challenge with traditional keyword ranking is that it's very hard for an individual to do on a personal computer or phone. This is because of the amount of personalization in Google SERPs. Google tends to deliver different results to people based on thousands of different factors, including:

• Device
• Locality
• Language
• Browsing history
• … and more

The end result is that two people may never see the same "ranking" result no matter how many times they search.

SEO ranking tools try to account for these personalization factors by using sophisticated methods to de-personalize search and simulate "average" results. While imperfect, this typically results in a good estimation that you see in rank tracking reports.

Here's one of our own internal keyword ranking reports we actually use at Moz from Moz Pro.

Note that "branded" keywords are specially marked, as you typically expect and hope to rank higher for terms containing your brand name.

Here's Britney Muller walking us through the process of checking rankings for a set of keywords.

According to Google, "position" is a specialized term that means "the position of the topmost link to your property or page in search results, averaged across all queries in which your property appeared."

Confused yet? Don't worry, so are most people at this point.

While Google's own documentation for how they calculate position can be confusing, and sometimes the reports are not very helpful, Search Console does have some good use cases. For example, you can sort and filter each keyword position by page, query, country, and device. This is actually super useful!

2. Local rank tracking

If your keywords have local search intent, rank tracking is a different beast entirely.

This is because keywords with local intent can have different rankings based on city, area code, and even neighborhood.

How do you know if your keywords have local intent? Typically, if a keyword triggers a Local Search Pack in Google, it's often a good indication that Google thinks this keyword has local intent.

Unsurprisingly, many of our "motorcycle jacket" keywords trigger a Local Pack, signaling local intent, as seen here.

(Be warned, not all local intent keywords will trigger a Local Pack for everyone, based on their own personalization.)

If you operate brick and mortar stores in these local markets — a Harley-Davidson, for example, or even a local store with only a single location — a local rank tracking solution that tracks keywords down to the neighborhood might be a smart idea.

Local rank tracking means tracking keywords in multiple locations, so you can see how your rankings change over distance. You can then visualize these rankings on a map.

Here's a look at how we track local rankings in our Local Market Analytics product.

By analyzing keywords at the city and neighborhood level, we can start to see both problems and opportunities that we wouldn't see using a global, non-personalized ranking system.

3. Rank indexes

Tracking the ranking of individual keywords can be helpful, especially if the keyword has high volume — but what if you need to track thousands (or tens of thousands) of keywords at the same time?

The individual data becomes much noisier.

In this case, it's helpful to use rank indexes — grouped around topical themes — that combine the ranking of several similar keywords into a single, useful metric.

For example, let's say we want to track these keywords in our "motorcycle jacket" topic. Instead of looking at individual keywords, we want to see how our website performed overall for this topic.

If we simply took the average of these rankings, we might get a chart that looked like this:

It's a good start. We can see that our average position for "motorcycle jackets" actually got worse (higher) over time.

If we want to make this type of analysis even more valuable, we want to do a couple of things:

1. Add a lot more keywords (hundreds or thousands more)
2. Include other data points, such as keyword position

If you'd like to do this manually, SEO expert AJ Kohn has a tutorial on setting up rank indexes over on his blog. Definitely worth a read.

Different SEO rank tracking software solutions also allow you to group keywords and track rankings by using these indexes. Here's how the dashboard of STAT (our enterprise rank tracking solution) displays data for a set of keywords we track at Moz:

4. Share of voice and visibility

Rank tracking and rank indexes are great for measuring your own keyword performance but ultimately aren't very informative about how you stack up against your competitors.

Enter Share of Voice (SOV).

Share of Voice shows you how much visibility you have for a given set of keywords compared to your competitors. In some toolsets, Share of Voice is simply known as "visibility".

Different tools calculate Share of Voice differently, but typically they attempt to show how much traffic and/or visibility you earn through your ranking keywords, taking into account such metrics as:

• Ranking position
• Expected CTR
• Keyword volume
• SERP features

These metrics are calculated not only for you but also for your competitors who rank for your chosen, tracked keywords.

Here's a Share of Voice report we use for Moz from our STAT dashboard:

Rank tracking: the final word

Executives and business owners like looking at ranking tracking metrics because it informs them about performance.

Smart SEOs like rank tracking because it uncovers opportunities.
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When we see certain keywords performing well, it can indicate it's a topic we should explore more. When we see competitors beating us on our own keywords, it can make us stop and question why.

Onward and upward

Congratulations! You've made it this far.

But you're not finished.

SEO literally starts with keyword research, but keyword research never ends. As you grow your content, optimize your pages, and continually reevaluate your strategy, your keyword research process will continue to pay dividends.

Happy optimizing!