Regardless of your business’s niche or industry, you can benefit from investing in a reliable rank tracking tool that enables you to see exactly how your search engine optimization efforts translate into rankings.
In this article, we highlighted a few ways you can use Squirrly’s Business Level keyword rank tracking tool to inform your strategy and make smart SEO moves moving forward.
But before we jump into the benefits you can experience by upgrading your Squirrly account to a Business account, you should know this:
- Tracking keywords that have nothing to do with your strategy, tracking too many keywords, tracking keywords that have no marketing or business impact; these are all common mistakes that often lead to a waste of time and resources.
- So, make sure the keywords you’re tracking are 100% relevant.
- Tracking the ranking of a keyword that only gets a few searches per month is not going to give you a whole lot to work off. You’re probably ranking for hundreds of phrases, and are not even aware of it.
Once you start tracking the right keywords, you can look into what the data tells you. (below, you can a see a screenshot of the Rankings section in Squirrly SEO).
1. Accurately Attribute a Ranking Success or a Setback to Actions You’ve Taken on Your Site
Compared to the data you see in Google Search Console, Squirrly’s SEO SERP checker included in the Business Plan shows you accurate, real-time rankings for your keywords.
It’s different from what you can see in Google Search Console, which is the Average Position of your website URLs for the query or queries.
- Average Position: This shows the average ranking of your website URLs for a query or queries. For instance, if your site’s URL appeared on position 4 for one query and position 6 for another query, the average position you’ll see in GSC would be 5: (3+7)/2).
What’s more, if you have a new site with no/low authority, Google may not even show you your average position.
GSC only starts looking at your site when you trigger an impression. And it also takes personalization factors into account.
Therefore, you can’t accurately connect that information with actions you’ve taken on a specific page, for instance.
This is bad because it will impact your decision making when using a data-driven strategy.
Being able to monitor your rankings accurately goes beyond the numbers you see.
Start thinking in terms of what actions you can take on that particular page to influence the ranking and push a page higher up in SERPs.
Try connecting any increase in Rankings or decrease in Ranking to something you’ve done on your site or something that Google has changed out there.
This is not just important – it’s the heart of the problem. And it’s the heart of Search Engine Optimization.
If you see your rankings drop, it’s time to think about possible explanations.
- Tracking groups of keywords to see if the drop is related to the keyword.
- Try to figure out if maybe your competitors took over that space in SERPs and now you’re no longer ranking for that keyword as high as you used to.
If you see your rankings improve, see if that success can be attributed to:
- a content update;
- optimization you’ve done;
- you getting more backlinks;
- enhancing your snippet;
- changes you’ve made to your site, structure-wise;
- the fact that you have removed old content that was dragging your site down.
Once you find an explanation that seems to add up, consider employing some of the same tactics to multiply your success and rank other pages on your site.
It’s a great indicator of what you should be doing next, and what are the things that you should focus on.
It also gives you a prioritization of where you need to put your energy next so that you don’t do unnecessary work.
One last thing to mention in this chapter is to make sure to document all the significant changes you make to your site.
This way, you’ll be better able to check back with your rankings and see if the implemented changes are achieving desired results or not.
2. Know If There’s a Problem (Immediately)
Some issues need to be diagnosed fast – and rankings can be a great indication that something went wrong.
For instance, if your site develops major issues that stop it from being indexed by Google or cause its authority to drop, then tracking your rankings can help you diagnose the problem quickly.
Not knowing something happened could lead to some severe damage.
So, you need to be able to take action right away – but you obviously can’t do that without knowing there’s a problem in the first place, or if you’re learning about it after considerable time has passed.
If you notice a sudden drop in your rankings which, of course, also impacts your traffic from Google, it’s important to diagnose the ranking issue as soon as possible.
Here’s a resource from Google on the process they recommend for diagnosing a ranking issue.
! Also make sure to request a Site Audit in Squirrly, as it can help you figure out what may be going on with your site faster and help you spot issues causing a drop in rankings.
This is why it’s so important to continue to use Squirrly’s Ranking Tool to track your placement in SERP, as it gives you updated, real-time information about your rankings.
Other rank tracking solutions, such as Google Search Console, don’t allow for this – as they don’t provide real-time rankings and what you’re getting is an average of your positioning on Google for a query.
So, you may not be able to associate that drop in ranking with a major issue, like a Google penalty, for example.
And if your ranking drops, you want to know about it as soon as it happens so that you can start working on a solution immediately to correct the problem, right?
As part of your Business plan, keywords can be analyzed Daily*, so you can rest assured knowing that you’ll be able to tell when there’s an urgent problem on your site, causing your rankings to drop.
** In the limit of queries left on your account. The Business plan gives you access to 3000 credits/month for SERP Checker. You can always check how many queries you have left for your account by going to Squirrly SEO/Account info from your WordPress Dashboard.
3. Monitor Your Competition using Squirrly’s Rank Tracking Tool
The Business Plan lets you add 7 Sites, and there’s no reason why one (or more) of them shouldn’t be the site of your competitor!
Keeping an eye on what the competition does is a healthy practice, one that comes with massive gains.
The first step of analyzing competitors in an actionable way is to look who’s in your space and might try to steal your place.
Here are two best practices to help you get started:
- Track the most common domains that rank on page 1 or 2 of Google for keywords you’re also targeting.
- Track specific sites. These sites can be those of your direct competitors that you’ve noticed are doing well. You can track their ranking specifically, and learn from what they’re doing right.
When tracking your competitors, you’re likely to come across one of these two scenarios:
A) You have the better ranking for a keyword that your competitor is targeting as well
If you monitor how they do in SERP, you can get a heads up that your competitors are on the rise and that they’re doing something to improve their rankings and come after your spot.
And that something could be that:
- They’re starting to get more backlinks;
- They’ve changed their content or added more valuable content to that page that’s on the rise in Google.
By knowing this, you can pay attention to what your competitor is doing and take action to ensure you won’t lose your spot on Google to them. This is how you stay proactive, and avoid being taken by surprise.
B) Your competitor has a better ranking
In this case, you’ll know which is the page for which they are ranking, and you can go ahead and study the reasons they are achieving better rankings. After analyzing what they are doing right, you can start applying some of what you learn to improve your results as well.
Either way, you have the upper hand if you have an advanced ranking tool that fetches you reliable data and allows you to accurately monitor what’s going on on your competitor’s site in terms of ranking.
Also, you can get inspired and target keywords that your competitor is targeting.
4. Prove Your Value with an Unbeatable Argument
More often than not, you won’t see a significant increase in organic traffic from search until you manage to rank in the top 10 positions in Google for keywords.
Achieving those top rankings doesn’t happen with the snap of a finger.
It’s something that can take time. So how can you know your SEO has a positive effect before then?
And how do you show your team, your boss, your clients (or even yourself) that the work you put in is actually bringing results?
By monitoring your rankings over time and the progress you’ve made, that’s how!
So, whether we’re talking about your boss, clients, or other team members, having data to back up your success will help you build credibility and reinforce your arguments.
If your rankings are starting to climb, this is proof that your SEO efforts are working.
In the Rankings section of Squirrly SEO, you can easily visualize your SEO progress.
Having this kind of data by your side will make it much easier for you to make the case of why you want to try a new tactic or strategy.
Also, it’s an excellent way to show you’re adding value to a client’s business and that you are moving the needle in the right direction.
Plus, as you make your way to the top ten positions in SERPs, you’ll also begin to gain traffic and conversions.
5. Be Alerted of Algorithm Changes and Updates
It’s not uncommon for positioning to drop as a result of an algorithm change. This is not at all comforting, I know, but it’s the reality.
The updates are also getting more sophisticated and more complex, so it can become increasingly hard to understand the impact a specific algorithm change has on your website.
These constant updates lead to volatility in the Google search results which can further lead to you, your boss or your clients panicking over the results shown.
Those types of situations will never occur if you use Squirrly’s Rank Tracking tool because you will always know exactly what’s going on with your site.
It remains imperative to understand whether your ranking drop or ranking boost coincides with overall ranking variations – which are often a sign that Google has done some sort of an update.
By tracking your most important keywords on a day-to-day basis, you can see if something that happened on Google’s end produced a change with high-volume keywords that you’re tracking.
This can alert you, often quicker than anything else, to an issue that you need to pay attention to.
It may also be a good idea to check if your main competitors were affected by the presumed algorithm change – and in what way.
Ready for Business Level Analytics?
As you saw from this article, Squirrly’s advanced SERP checker makes it extremely easy to know the true position of your website on Google and build a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t for your site.
Try Business today and unlock powerful benefits that will help supercharge your results! See what’s included in the Business Plan here.
