Being an SEO professional, your everyday to-do’s checklist must hold rank tracking as a critical task. Are you tracking your keyword rankings properly? Or, not even sure about it? By the way, mistakes are not only set to beginners alone.
Even expert marketers would commit to those. When it comes to rank tracking, the mistakes you do might impact your SEO execution and further takeaway.
I have read online that around 23% of people used the Serpstat rank tracker tool, were not configured properly. Likewise, there are plenty of other SERP rank tracking tools available. If you are not using those perfectly, then your investment goes meaningless.
This is an eye-opening post making you aware of the most common rank tracking mistakes to avoid. Be informed and turn out your keyword rank tracking campaigns fruitful. Let’s get in to those silly mistakes typically bound to happen while tracking ranking positions.
1. Forgetting about mobile tracking.
Most of the time, you ignore tracking keywords for mobile searches. Google’s mobile-first indexing insists on how significant our SEO towards mobile.
Indeed, mobile-friendliness of a site impacts desktop ranking eventually.
Studies show that mobile searches out beaten the desktop queries’ volume, and mobile users bounce more than desktop. Hence, it becomes obvious to optimize your site or page for mobile searches. You believe it or not, ranking positions will be different against mobile and desktop searches. If you are serious about crafting your SEO strategy based on the current ranking performance, then you must take mobile ranking into account.
If you are omitting mobile rank tracking, then there is no point to perform rank checks. There are SERP tracking tools out there with easy options to switch between desktop and mobile tracking. Make use of it, track your site’s ranking potential towards mobile searches, and optimize further.
2. Less care about local keyword tracking.
The search results we get from any search engines depend on search habits, devices you use, and location. Especially, all the SERP elements rely on location.
You must be aware that the ranking positions will be varying if tracking from different locations. Not only the organic listings but also the knowledge panel paid ads, etc. However, rankings don’t bring business themselves like traffic, or organic leads do.
Still, there is no other better way to examine your SEO efforts other than rank tracking, especially for geo-specific keywords.
Is your website under-performing in a specific location giving away the market to your competitors? You should obviously monitor its ranking over the period after every SEO inputs or change in your SEO strategy. Perhaps this may not be a hard rule, but local SEO ranking helps you immensely in higher conversion rates.
Especially a business that operates in multiple locations; tracking localized results can help to streamline your promotional activities for certain locations.
Make sure your keyword tracking tool enables you to check ranking country-wise, city-wise, and even street-wise or pin code. Meanwhile, don’t always keep tracking Google ranking results irrespective of the popular search engine in your country.
For an instant, Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and so on. Tools like SEO PowerSuite Rank Tracker performs ranking checks in more than 500 search engines.
3. Not grouping keywords on tracking.
In the case of bulk keyword ranking checks, not categorizing the keywords can get you minimal results for further optimization. It will be overwhelming to manage a big list of keywords that are not grouped in some order.
Tracking or optimizing keywords blindly won’t get your desired outcomes. Most of the Google position tracking tools come with keyword grouping and tagging features. With which, you are liable to handle even thousands of search queries hassle-free.
By categorizing the keywords, you can easily set up your repetitive tracking campaigns if you target only certain keywords over a period. There is no need to feed the keywords again and again like you do for the first time. Just by filtering the keyword group, you can play around. Instantly adding tags to your keywords can help you further for an effective action plan. Indeed, the tool options are flexible to assign the same keywords to multiple groups.
For an instance, refer to the below image, once after checking the ranking results, you ought to run PPC campaigns for some keywords.
Otherwise, optimizing internal links for specific keywords and so on.
4. Failing to track competitor’s.
Only by tracking competitor’s ranking position, you can set your ranking goals and achieve it. And also, it is essential, if you want to rank for your competitor’s keywords.
In case of using any 3rd party rank tracking tools, make sure that it allows you to track as much as competitors for certain keywords.
Understanding the market standard is most crucial. The traffic share that your site drives among your competitors is imperative than simply checking your average ranking positions.
Anyways, there is no need to delimit your resources creating multiple new projects for each competitor. While setting up a fresh project for tracking your site ranking positions, you may include your competitors. Spy out which category of keywords your competitors are dominating you in the SERP page. Nab their SEO strategy for your benefits.
By the way, there are even smarter tools out there that track even top 100 results towards any specific keyword you fed.
5. Not subjecting to the site changes.
Tracking your website ranking positions before and after making changes to it. Don’t simply astray yourself that doing a lot of changes to your pages can bring a big difference in your ranking performance. Be selective with even minor changes you made.
Hence, you can determine the value of your SEO efforts. How effectively you have done SEO efforts that might be costlier too? If it doesn’t bring expected results, then there is no point.
Using the tagging options, tag keywords for every change, and monitor the results. Let’s consider, you optimize a page towards a target keyword increasing the keyword usage.
Now tag that certain keyword using ‘the data of change”. Further, compare the ranking results for a week or two to evaluate the quality of your SEO inputs.
6. Missing configuring landing pages.
A landing page is the one that you wish to rank in top against specific search terms and your visitors must ‘land’ on. What if an untargeted page ranks well for your target keyword?
The average bounce rate of your site will hike-up. To overcome this, set targeted landing pages and assign certain keywords to it. If an irrelevant page ranks for a potential keyword, then rank tracker tools would alert notifications.
Make sure you are driving organic readers to your desired landing pages. The right page has to rank for the right keywords at the right time.
Few suggestions:
- Using any of the rank tracking tools, don’t create new projects to track each of your competitor’s rankings. You will lose the resource credits or money soon, doing so.
- Make use of the reporting features that every tool offers organizing the ranking data properly. While working for multiple clients or targeting bulk keywords, lessen your time over analysis with these strategic reports.
- Make sure the rank tracking tool you use, updates ranking data once in a day at least. There are reliable tools out there that update even multiple times within a day to offer fresh ranking results.
Final take away.
Hope I have shared at least a few things, rank tracking mistakes that you might less-noticed. Avoiding these blunders not only strategize your SEO executions but also help you to utilize your rank tracking tool for the utmost benefits. By knowing these small gigs, you don’t spend additional money, time, and efforts to dig ranking history, check competitor’s ranking, etc.
Tools that fetch the top 100 ranking domains for certain keywords can also help you study the market volatility. And, to understand how difficult it is for you to achieve the top results for specific keywords.
Look through these acquainted mistakes while using rank trackers, stay out of it, and use the services profitably. Streamline your SEO efforts for better rankings.
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