Hello and welcome back to our course!
This is the first lesson of the ‘MEASURE’ module.
It is dedicated to monitoring your campaign and adjusting your strategy.
In this lesson, we will learn how to use Position Tracking to monitor the progress of your rankings
on search engines.
To do this, we will use the data picked out from the Keyword Magic Tool.
Position Tracking allows you to monitor your and your competitors’ organic and paid Google
rankings for a list of keywords you’ve selected, and to manage them in several ways.
First, let’s set the Position tracking tool up.
Go to your projects list, then select Position Tracking.
In the setup menu, choose what you want to track - a root domain, a subdomain, a URL,
or a subfolder.
We recommend that you begin with setting a root domain for tracking, and then narrow
your tracking scope later.
By setting a specific URL, you will get the results exactly matching this URL, so you
need to be sure that this is the URL you want to track.
You can change the tracking scope at any time, and all the data, including the historical
data, will be updated right away.
Setting up your Business Name will help you see the locations where you succeeded with
getting into Local Packs.
It is important in case your business is focused on certain locations.
Unlike the SEMrush ‘domain analytics reports’ which provide data on the national level,
Position Tracking allows you to track rankings for a specific location!
You can monitor your rankings on desktop and mobile SERPs by setting up projects for different
targetings.
Guru and Business subscribers can see how to streamline their SEO efforts by merging
their projects in a multitargeting project later on, this can be done in the ‘Devices
and Locations’ report.
If you select one of multilingual countries like Canada or Belgium, where Google performs
searches in different languages, you will be able to choose the desired language.
Next, add up to 20 competitors to compare your rankings to.
They can be either added manually or selected from a suggested list.
Finally, choose keywords for your tracking campaign.
You can:
Add them manually.
Receive suggestions based on SEMrush’s organic or paid positions reports.
Receive suggestions from your Google Analytics account.
Import them from a file.
You can also add more keywords whenever you want.
It may take a few minutes to half an hour for Position Tracking to gather the data for
your project.
This depends on the number of keywords you wish to track.
Once the report is gathered, you will jump to the “Position Tracking” overview page.
There you will find the visibility trend of your website.
Visibility is a metric that reflects how visible your domain, subdomain or URL is for the list
of keywords you’ve set up.
100% visibility means that the tracked domain, subdomain or URL has the first position for
every keyword in the project, while zero visibility indicates that it doesn’t rank in Google’s
top-100 for these keywords.
You can analyze how your competitors succeeded in ranking for the keywords of interest by
seeing which domain has the highest “visibility” metric.
Also, keep an eye on the estimated traffic and average position metrics.
Estimated traffic is a calculation that predicts how many people will visit the domain daily
from the keywords being tracked.
Average position is the average of all the rankings for the keywords in your campaign.
An increase in your domain’s estimated traffic as well as its average position rise indicates
that you are making progress in your SEO.
You can compare up to 5 domains from your competitor list by these metrics at the same
time.
The “Ranking Distribution” report allows you to:
Find out who attracts more attention by comparing your domain and your competitors’ domains’
visibility and estimated traffic.
See the number of keywords in the campaign you and your competitors have in the top 3,
top 10, top 20, and top 100 positions.
The ‘Rankings’ report provides you with data on your ranking and your competitors’
ranking for every keyword you’ve set up in the campaign.
The report is organized as a table with the list of keywords.
Every competitor you add for comparison is represented as a column of data.
The “Landing Pages” report shows you the landing pages of the selected domain that
rank for the list of the campaign’s keywords.
Here you can find the distribution of estimated traffic and total volume between the pages,
and their average positions.
The “Competitors Discovery” report will help you find out who you are competing with
for your target audience.
It is a good place to find your competitors because it discovers them based on your list
of keywords.
You can see the domains that compete with you for keywords in the top 3/5/10/20/50 or
100 results of Google.
The ‘Featured Snippets” report will help you find the opportunities to get at Featured
Snippet position, see the keywords your domain already ranks for in a Featured Snippet.
Furthermore, it estimates how much traffic you might gain in case you win a Featured
Snippet.
You can also set up alerts triggered when a certain event takes place, and get the summary
of your progress via email every week.
Just a reminder.
In this lesson, we’ve learned about the Position Tracking tool.
It allows you to observe your SEO campaign in comparison with your competitors.We advise
you to play around with Position Tracking, because practice makes perfect.
Also, don’t forget to consult the ‘Read Further’ section, and visit the SEMrush
blog and Knowledge Base.