Keyword Rank Checker

Understanding the importance of keyword rank tracking

Tracking your keyword rankings is critical to long-term SEO success. The SERPs (search engine results pages) and search engine algorithms constantly change, meaning a “set it and forget it” keyword strategy won’t cut it. 

You need to monitor your rankings to stay on top of trends, remain ahead of your competitors, and claim more organic traffic for your target keywords. 

Why tracking keyword rankings matters

Keyword rank tracking gives you valuable insights into your content’s performance in search engine results. Rankings reveal where your content excels and highlight areas where it may be missing opportunities to capture organic traffic, enabling you to focus your efforts on strategies that deliver the highest ROI. 

By monitoring your keyword rankings, you can: 

• Gauge search visibility.
  See the percentage of traffic your site captures for any of your target keywords. You can then analyze competing pages to see how they’re capturing a percentage of the same keyword traffic. 
• Find missed opportunities.
  Uncover relevant keywords you don’t rank for yet. Pick the ones with the highest potential to drive more traffic, and tailor your efforts to rank better for them.
• Evaluate your long-term SEO efforts.
  Measure how your keyword rankings have improved or declined over a period of time. See what initiatives have worked so far, and identify what’s not worth the effort.
• Get ahead of competition.
  Monitor search trends to reveal patterns in what matters to your target audience. Optimize content focused on upward-trending topics and spend less time on topics that may be declining in search.
• Determine areas to collaborate with your SEM/PPC.
  Whether it’s testing different terms or increasing overall spend to facilitate SERP domination, identify opportunities to combine your efforts and win. 

Challenges in manual rank tracking

While manually tracking your keyword rankings is possible, it’s time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies. Your website can rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords, and trying to track them all is overwhelming and nearly impossible. You’ll also miss out on tracking keywords across multiple regions and devices since you can manually only track from your IP address. 

You can monitor how your rankings may change in the SERPs, but you need more insight to really adjust your content strategy. Without a keyword rank checker, you’ll miss key data points such as the organic search volume of each keyword, its ranking difficulty, and the percentage of search your site is capturing. 

Save time: Use our free Keyword Rank Checker

This Keyword Rank Checker Tool gives you free, insightful data at your fingertips. Spend less time collecting keyword data and more time strategizing your SEO and marketing campaigns. 

Let’s walk through the features of our Keyword Rank Checker tool. 

Keyword search-ranking metrics

Simply enter your site URL into our Keyword Rank Checker and click “View Rankings” to access essential search ranking metrics.

These include: 

• Keyword: A term or phrase that your site ranks for 
• Rank: The ranking position of the keyword (for example, if it says “2,” that means your site will appear as the second result on page 1 of Google for that keyword)
• Traffic %: The percentage of traffic that your site receives from that keyword ranking, compared to its overall traffic (the higher the percentage, the better)
• Volume: The estimated monthly traffic from that keyword
• KD %: The keyword difficulty percentage estimates how difficult it to rank for that keyword (with green indicating easier and red indicating the hardest)
• CPC (USD): The cost per click in USD, or US dollars (a higher CPC typically indicates a more competitive, valuable keyword)
• # of Results: The total estimated number of results related to that keyword on Google
• Search Trend: The fluctuations in that keyword’s search traffic over a period of time

Keyword rank tracking is more than just seeing where your site appears on Google; it’s about understanding how various metrics work together to provide a complete picture of your keyword performance. 

It’s important to look at the data holistically so you can make the most accurate adjustments to your content strategy. By factoring in all of the unique data points offered by our Keyword Rank Checker tool, you can optimize for both short-term wins and long-term SEO success.

We have only just scratched the surface of the range of keyword data available with Semrush Keyword Analysis Tools, as well as the multiple applications for your business marketing plan and growth strategies. Check out the range of other deep-insight keyword tools available from Semrush.