In this article, we cover an important topic: position tracking. This action, sometimes neglected by beginners, is nevertheless a must for any SEO who would like to improve their rankings on search engines.
Have you launched a website and are you working on your SEO? Congratulations, you are on the way to success. From now on, to optimize your pages and gain positions on the SERP, we encourage you to do rigorous position tracking.
Why ? How to do ? Nothing's easier. Our SEO specialist gives you his tips in this complete article. Pay attention, you have before you a gold mine of information.
What is position tracking on Google?
Regardless of your level in natural referencing, tracking positions is a concept that you absolutely must master.
This term refers to the process of monitoring and tracking the position of a particular website or URL on search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific queries.
What are the keywords that drive organic traffic? Which pages are performing well on your site? What improvements will you be able to make to your URLs? These are all questions you can answer if you track your location regularly.
Note that this operation can very well be performed manually. But today, there are a number of tools that do just that for you. We present the best of them to you below, in this article.
Position tracking determines your SEO strategy
Checking your ranking in Google, for the keywords you are targeting, seems essential to us. This process will determine certain actions relating to your natural referencing.
Optimize your content
You are perfectly aware that updating your content is an important criterion in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Tracking the movements of your URLs on the SERPs can lead you to make strategic decisions:
+ You observe an improvement in your positions, your On-page SEO is therefore relevant in the eyes of the robot. It's perfect. Now is not the time to edit your page. Wait for it to stabilize to complete it with fresh content.
+ You observe a drop in your positions: it is time to react. Presumably, one or more elements of your page do not please the robot. Is the semantic optimization of your content powerful enough compared to that of competitors? Do your hns contain the right keywords? Aren't you missing a few hundred words to come and grab the top positions? Here is a series of questions you need to ask yourself.
+ Your positions have been stable for a while: we are referring to point 1. We think it is wise to take advantage of this moment to update your page. Choose another aspect of the subject you are covering and expand on it.
💡 Tip: the FAQ section is useful for adding content. For example, you can use one or more questions from the “Other Questions Asked” block and answer them.
Choose URLs to push
Bringing “SEO juice” to your website is a hotly debated topic. Do you have to do it exclusively organically? Can you buy some links to boost the authority of your pages?
Why choose ? Use both methods! And there, tracking the positions of your site makes sense. Indeed, thanks to it, you are able to spot URLs that could generate traffic quickly. Are you positioned at the top of page 2, bottom of page 1, on a request with high potential? It is on these URLs that you must bet in priority.
With this position tracking you are doing, you now know where to focus your netlinking efforts.
What about your competitors then?
We cannot repeat it enough: competitive intelligence is a key element of digital marketing. It should be done frequently! Monitoring the positioning of your competitors on the SERPs is one of them.
Imagine that one of your competitors gains 10 positions on a query and finds himself in the top 3. Thanks to your rigorous monitoring, you notice it. You should then ask yourself the following questions:
- What has changed in its content?
- Has he optimized his meta title?
- Was it the acquisition of one or more backlinks that propelled it like this? Which ?
- Has he worked on the performance of his URL?
💡 Tip: thanks to a site like archive.org, you are able to observe the state of a page at a given time. This is useful if you want to compare the content at two different times.
SEMRush, the best tool to track your positioning on Google?
Simple question, simple answer: YES!
Even though there are a number of powerful SEO tools like Ahrefs and Monitorank to name a few, we recommend using SEMRush to track your results in an organized way.
To do this, it's very simple:
1 In the left column, click on “position tracking”. This option is part of the “Keyword Research” section.
2 At the top right, click on "Create a project" and enter your domain name. You can give the project a name.
3 You can then select the preferred search engine (choose Google), the type of device on which the tracking will be carried out (we most often choose the telephone but it depends on your theme and the habits of your audience), a location geographical (France, or a city if you are doing local tracking, Paris for example) as well as the associated language.
4 Next, enter the keywords you want to track position for. Then click on “Add to campaign”.
Now you can start tracking your keywords. Easy, isn't it? The advantages of using SEMRush are multiple in our opinion:
- The results are accurate;
- The installation is very simple;
- You receive a weekly follow-up by email to be sure not to miss anything;
- SEMRush offers a “Competitor Discovery” report to observe who is ranking on these keywords;
- By clicking on “Destination page”, you are able to observe all the keywords on which a URL ranks. The search volumes for these queries will be listed.
💡 Tip: if you observe two of your URLs that are placed on the same keyword, you may be in a situation of semantic cannibalization. It deserves your full attention.
