Rank tracking or position tracking

Tracking the rank is the SEO process which involves evaluation of your website performance from keyword ranking and visibility standpoints as well as analysis of Google’s SERPs and their behavior. Once you collect this data, it will help you to determine if you stand out of your competition, whether your SEO campaign pays off, and if you need to adjust your marketing strategy. 

You can use SEMrush, a position tracking tool to track the rank of your website. This tool helps you to track your keyword rankings on various devices and across various locations worldwide. 

Its rich functionality helps you to perform various tasks like local SEO and rank tracking.

What is SEO position tracking?

We can choose to track the position of :

• A root domain
• A subdomain 
• A URL
• A subfolder

It is recommended to start tracking with the root domain and only narrow your tracking scope afterward. If you want to track for URL and want to get the result exactly the same as this URL then type URL carefully. You can change the tracking scope at any time and all the data including historical data will get updated right away. 

If you want to track the locations where you have succeeded in getting into local packs, then you should set up for your business name. It’s an important step to take if your business is focused on certain locations, which the Position Tracking allows you to track rankings for. You can track the ranking locally as well as you can choose a country, a region, a city, and a certain area belonging to a particular zip code. 

Choose your search engine. Google is set by default, but if you want to track search results in China then, click Baidu.

After this, select the device to track results on. You can choose a desktop, mobile, or tablet. 

You need to be a bit careful while choosing a search engine, location, language, and device settings. Because you can not change any of these parameters after you run your tracking campaign.

At last, select your keywords for your tracking campaign. You can:

• Add them manually 
• Receive suggestions from your Google Analytics account
• Import them from a file 

You are allowed to add more keywords whenever you want. The time taken to complete the position tracking depends on the number of keywords you wish to track. 

Once your report is gathered. You will end up in the landscape report. In this report, you’ll find widgets with all the most important metrics and graphs from other tools at your fingertips in one place.

From this report, you will get information about trends and current values of:

• Your website’s visibility
• Estimated traffic 
• Average position 

Visibility measures how visible your domain, subdomain or URL is for the given set of keywords. 100% visibility means tracked domain, subdomain or URL has the first position for every keyword in the project, on the other hand, zero visibility means it does rank in Google’s top 100 for these keywords.  

Estimated Traffic is a calculation about how many people will visit the domain for tracked keywords. 

The 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 a rise in its average position indicates that you are making progress in your SEO.

Tool will also provide you the information about distribution about the position of your website for your target keywords across the top 3, top 10, top 30, and top 100 as well as a comparison between improved and declined positions. On the right side of the widget, there is also a bar graph that shows how your website’s ranking is improved over time.

There are three widgets that deal with your set of keywords:

• Top keywords 
• Positive impact
• Negative impact

Top keywords are those which contribute to increasing your website’s visibility. 

Positive and negative impact lists show how your website has gained or lost visibility due to changes in the position of certain keywords. These lists can help you to identify the keywords which need to focus while doing on-page SEO.

There is also a competitors widget that describes the competitors of your website. All the description is given in the gram from where you can get an idea about how you fare against them.

There is also a table that allows you to compare your and your competitor rankings for your target keyword. You can measure your progress in positions, estimated traffic, and visibility. 

Use various filters to see the trends and the keywords list with specific conditions applied. For instance, you can filter keywords by:

• Specific positions and their changes 
• Presence of SERP features on their SERPs
• Volume
• Presence or absence of specific words

The Ranking distribution report allows you to:

• find out who attracts more attention by comparing your 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.

In brief, position tracking tools are useful and give you valuable information about the ranking system of your website. It allows you to track daily the ranking of your website for a set of target keywords, comparing to your competitors and finding new and local competitors.