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Wow your clients with reports that showcase your success on their SEO campaigns.

How do you prove to your clients that you’ve delivered on your promise to help them climb to the top of the search engines? You can’t just tell them. You have to show them. With Keyword.com’s agency rank tracking tool, you can generate accurate keyword reports that are fully customizable and available on-demand.

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Keyword.com is the best rank tracking tool trusted by more than 2,000 companies to dominate Google search, including hundreds of top SEO services agencies:

Why Keyword.com?

We’re known as the swiss army knife of website rank trackers. Keyword.com is an easy-to-use rank tracking tool with all the features SEO agencies need (and then some) to track and report their SEO strategies’ performance and status in the search engines.

Go as granular as you want with this SEO tool by executing keyword rank tracking at the device level, by location, and more, all in real-time.

 

	Use Keyword Tracking for Desktop and Mobile Rankings   Are your client’s rankings for their most important keywords higher on Google desktop or Google mobile searches? With Keyword.com’s rank tracking tools, you can answer that question! Not only that, but you’re limited to Google’s main search results, like other rank trackers. You can also get keyword ranking data for Google Local Maps and YouTube videos.
Get Insights for Any Language and Location   If your SEO agency is a provider for clients around the world or those with multilingual sites, use Keyword.com to track rankings in multiple languages. No need to stop there with this SEO rank tracker. Track keyword performance for multiple locations by specifying a zip code or city for each keyword. You’ll get insights about rankings, including keyword search volume, to help your clients dominate local rankings, Google Maps, and more.
	Dominate YouTube Search   Do your agency clients include YouTube stars, or do you have a client that creates a lot of video content? Because YouTube is the world’s number two search engine with tons of search volume, ranking opportunities for millions of keywords on this platform are yours for the taking. Get accurate metrics about where your clients appear in search and for what keywords. Then work your magic to make them show up first.
Simplify Keyword Tracking with Tags   If you’re tracking hundreds or thousands of keywords across multiple locations, it can get overwhelming to manage all of those metrics. Our tag feature gives you the functionality to segment your keywords for a project based on the criteria you choose. It could be based on ranking opportunities, high vs. low competition, priority, work-in-progress, etc. Then, create a report that displays only the tags you want to view or share with a client.

 

“In the past year alone, I’ve increased over a million dollars in revenue. We’re able to gain an extra one to two clients per week (at the very least).

– Matt Ross, Senior Vice President at Hozio

 

5 Reasons to Love Keyword.com

SEO professionals and marketing agencies tell us they love how easy to use our agency rank tracker is. But don’t let the ease of use fool you. Underneath Keyword.com’s pretty face is a powerful tool packed with features and functionality that get results.

1. Intuitive User Interface   Your clients pay you for results like getting their website to position one on Google, not mastering the latest agency rank tracking software. Keyword.com doesn’t require lengthy tutorials or onboarding to figure out. You’ll have this tool mastered in minutes. And, if you have questions, our customer service team is happy to help or provide a demo.
	2. 100% Accuracy with Third-Party Verification   Trust is a huge factor for SEO agencies. Your clients need to have faith that the keyword rankings you report are accurate and you’re not blowing their budgets. Our keyword rank tracker is backed by a third-party verification tool. Just click the Spyglass icon on a report to see where your client’s website ranks on Google, Google mobile, and Google Maps results.
3. Best in Class Reporting   The way you communicate with clients on their campaigns’ performance and keyword rank changes is a critical piece in the client retention puzzle. Instead of spending hours creating reports and drilling down the data, you can build out bespoke custom reports practically on autopilot using our keyword rank tracker. No more manual tools like Google sheets or complicated interfaces like Google Data Studio, trying to show the latest rankings. You’ve got everything you need to share key metrics all in one place.
	4. Competitive Insights   For each project, you can also monitor your client’s top competitors and see how they compare in the search engine rankings. As you track position history, you can look back in time and even create visual Mindshare reports for your clients based on the keywords that you are prioritizing for the campaigns, including keyword search volumes and map results.
5. Transparent Pricing   All of our pricing plans include every single feature we offer in our SEO rank tracker. You don’t have to upgrade to get access to anything or add new users. Our pricing is based on the number of keywords you’re tracking as an agency. Plain and simple.

 

“I cannot survive without Keyword.com”

– Mohit Parnami, Director of Ribbun Software Pvt. Ltd. 

 

Save Time   Don’t spend hours creating and tweaking reports. With a few clicks of a mouse, you’ll have a beautiful report that looks professional and won’t leave your client saying, “What am I looking at?”

Boost Credibility   White label your reports using our tool for custom branding. Add your company name, logo, and take advantage of other customization features that make your company stand out and show you’re the best.

Speed up Shareability   You can practically create and share reports in your sleep. Actually, you can. Simply set a schedule and delivery method for your reports, and they’ll go to the right person at the right time and in the right format.

 

A Complete Suite of Tools at Your Agency’s Fingertips

 

Professional Dashboard View your stats at a glance with a visually appealing dashboard that you can share with team members and clients.	Advanced Tracking From local rankings to YouTube, from device to language, you can track all the things related to your keywords with our rank tracker.	Keyword Tagging Make SEO projects manageable by tagging keywords in relevant categories for tracking and reporting.
Competitive Insights Compare your clients’ ranking to their competitors to identify keyword opportunities and track historical data about keywords.	White Label Reporting Customize the look and feel of your rank tracker reports and share them however you choose, including PDF, CSV, or a link.	On-Demand Alerts Get notified whenever your clients rise or fall in the search engine results for their best keywords. Celebrate the wins!
Connected Data Sources Connect with Google Analytics to get even more insights about organic traffic, rankings, and performance.	Powerful API Integrate our powerful ranking data into all of your applications and ideas.	Team Access Add unlimited team members and give them access to campaigns on a per project basis.

 

Now What? Ready to take your rank tracking services to the next level? Sign up for a free 7-day trial and see what the Keyword.com rank tracker can do. Prefer some guidance in navigating the platform? We’re happy to give you a tour and walk you through all the features!

 

Get real-time, actionable SEO insights for thousands of keywords at your fingertips.

With Keyword.com’s enterprise rank tracking tool, you can track thousands of keywords across your entire website. Monitor your performance and your competitors so that you’ll be equipped to win. Keyword.com is the tool you need to take your SEO to the next level and keep it there.

Keyword.com is the enterprise rank tracker trusted by more than 2,000 companies to dominate Google search, including:

 

Why Keyword.com?

Track thousands of internal and competitor keywords. Get keyword search volume analytics, so you know how to prioritize your efforts.

Get accurate real-time and historical SEO data. Our data sources provide third-party verified keyword rankings, so you know exactly where you stand.

Harness the power of enterprise functionality with a keyword rank tracker that won’t break the bank.

 

You Need the Right Tool to Dominate Search Results

It’s competitive out there. All SEOs want to earn top keyword placement on page one of a Google search. Enterprise SEOs need more than what most keyword rank tracking tools provide for their clients.

It’s not enough to rely on a basic run of the mill SEO strategy from the average agency. And, getting SEO data and analytics you can rely on to answer your burning SEO questions is non-negotiable. You need to take your strategy to the next level with an enterprise SEO solution that delivers. You’re not a startup anymore; things have to change.

Done right, enterprise SEO will result in a dramatic increase in traffic for your website, leading to more qualified leads and sales. But first, you need the right rank tracker to get the job done.

SEO Is More Important than Ever for Your Business

61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their keyword rank is their top inbound marketing priority.

57% of marketing executives say on-page content development was the most effective SEO tactic for their site.

70% of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC. This stat alone paves the way for a professional rank tracking tool.

 

61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their keyword rank is their top inbound marketing priority.

57% of marketing executives say on-page content development was the most effective SEO tactic for their site.

70% of marketers see SEO as more effective than PPC. This stat alone paves the way for a professional rank tracking tool.

Source: https://www.impactplus.com/blog/seo-statistics

 

Enterprise SEO Requires Next Level Strategies and Tactics

You already know that enterprise SEO is a beast. You’re not tracking dozens or even hundreds of keywords. You’re monitoring thousands of keywords, and your competitors are sophisticated.

You can’t content yourself in playing in the sandbox of longtail keywords, social media, and small-scale keyword ranking tools. To climb to the top of the SERP, your needs include having rank tracking software that gets the job done, providing you with accurate and sophisticated analytics and insights on-demand and on your terms.

That’s where Keyword.com comes in.

Everything’s Included

Unlike other enterprise rank trackers and keyword performance data tools, we don’t make you pick and choose what features are must-haves and what things you can live without. You get access to it all, no matter how many keywords you’re tracking on our platform, whether it’s hundreds, all the way up to 20,000, and more.

Intuitive User Interface You don’t need a lengthy onboarding process to learn how to use Keyword.com. Our platform is easy to use and equipped with helpful tool tips that give you ideas on how to get the most out of the tool, all in one place.   And if you do need help, our customer service team is standing by and ready to answer your questions.
	Data-driven Dashboard Get insights about SEO rankings and performance at a glance, all in one place. Compare each competitor side by side or view data sorted by keyword, website URL, or ranking URL.   The data can be sorted and customized on the page to suit your individual needs and provide you with powerful keyword rank data that will guide you on where to take action.
Segment Keywords by Tags Tags help you categorize and organize your keywords in relevant groups. You can set up tags however you’d like, including priority, region, audience, and more.   Tagging data can be a way to uncover blind spots or opportunities in your current SERP rank.
	Competitive Tracking The Keyword.com enterprise rank tracker doesn’t limit you to tracking your own keyword rankings in the Google top 100. You can also view current and historical search engine data for all of your competitors.   The rank data is also archived so that you can reference it later.
Landscape Monitoring Get a visual representation of how your business shows up on the Google SERP compared to your competitors.   Mindshare gives you advanced rank tracking analytics in a visual display.
	API Access Keyword.com’s simplistic API allows you to integrate our powerful ranking data into all of your applications and ideas. Integrate Google Analytics, too, to see organic search volume for a page!
Real-time Keyword Movement Alerts Want to know when a keyword climbs or drops in the SERP? Our rank tracker can alert you of these keyword rank changes based on your preferences. Choose whether you want to receive ranking data as real-time alerts via email or view everything directly on the platform.
	Custom Reporting Get an easy-to-interpret rank tracking report of your SEO performance, including all relevant data points. Choose how often you want to receive keyword reports, who should receive them, and if you’d prefer CSV or PDF pages.   SEO professionals love this feature because it allows them to send different types of reports to various stakeholders within the business.
Permission levels Unlike small to mid-sized agencies, enterprise SEO professionals often have multiple layers of an organization that want to see keyword performance data.   Some people need full access to keyword data, while others should have more limited views without editing capabilities. With Keyword.com, you get unlimited users at no extra fee.
	Transparent Pricing Using Keyword.com is like staying at an all-inclusive resort. You get everything at your fingertips for one flat fee. We don’t water down the drinks, either. Not ready to commit? We offer a 7-day full-access free trial.

 

 

Want to take the Keyword.com rank tracking tool for a test drive. Schedule a demo.

 

Case Study – Ranking 1,870,000 Pages on Google

 

Perhaps there’s no task more daunting than getting an entire encyclopedia to rank at the top of the search engines.

 

Encyclopedia Britannica is one of the most visited websites in the world, with millions of visitors per month across 247 countries. The secret to Encyclopedia Britannica’s success was being able to track thousands of keywords and get accurate SEO reporting and ranking data.

 

With close to 85% of the site visitors coming from search, they knew that SEO was a big part of their plans for a successful strategy.

 

“Before using Keyword.com, we were just tracking 500 keywords, and that was already a handful to do because we were having a hard time getting reliable ranking data for those keywords from Google. With Keyword, we were able to get reliable numbers and expand the number of keywords. Now, instead of 500 keywords, we’re tracking over 10,000.”

 

–   Gavin Chiu – Director of Technology, Taxonomy Products, SEO at Encyclopedia Britannica

 

Keyword.com wasn’t the first rank tracker the company had used. Gavin’s biggest complaints about the competition in the rank tracking space were that the platforms were too costly and didn’t provide accurate results. They were even served blank columns across hundreds of keyword results.

 

Keyword.com allows you to scale your SEO without ballooning your budget. Save time and focus on strategy, not tedious SEO tasks.

 

 

	Get Data about YouTube Rankings   You don’t have to limit yourself just to your primary website domain. If you’ve got a YouTube channel, you can also track your SEO rankings on the YouTube platform.
Track Local Results   We also track the “Snack Pack” within Google organic listings and on Google Maps. If you’ve got a multi-location business, this information is a must.
	Monitor Featured Snippets   Want to see at a glance if your site appears in the rankings as a coveted featured snippet? We’ll show you the result!
100% Accuracy Guarantee   Verify your results by clicking on the Spyglass icon in your keyword report. See exactly where your site is ranking and who’s outranking you or nipping at your heels. This insight into competitor keyword rank is invaluable.
	View Desktop and Mobile Rankings   Most SEOs know that the SERP data differs between desktop and mobile devices, but not every SERP tracking tool will show you the difference. Keyword.com does. For each keyword, you can track a mobile and desktop version.

 

 

Now What?   Ready to take the next step toward boosting your SERP rankings?   Sign up for a free 7-day trial and see what the Keyword.com rank tracker can do.   Prefer some guidance in navigating the platform? We’re happy to give you a tour and walk you through all the features!

 

 

You don’t always need a fancy or expensive SEO tool to get insights about your SEO efforts. Google Analytics is totally free, and it gives you a wealth of data about your website’s visitors. Use the insights we’re about to share with you in this guide to up your SEO game and do basic keyword tracking in Google Analytics without spending a dime.

Before You Begin – Set up Your Google Analytics Account

If you’ve already set up your Google Analytics account, then you can skip to the next section. If you haven’t, however, don’t panic. All you have to do is create a free account and add the tracking code to your website. Google gives step-by-step instructions here.

You can also sign up for Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools), which is another free Google tool for website owners to get information about site performance, traffic sources, user behavior, keywords, and the user experience.

Google Search Console isn’t a requirement for getting keywords ranked on your site, but it can help with troubleshooting and search engine performance. For example, with Google Analytics, you might run a report about searchers behavior.

With Google Search Console, on the other hand, your report will have info related more specifically to the SERPs. Both GA and Google Search Console will be an invaluable part of your SEO work.

Understanding Your Google Analytics Account

The GA dashboard has a ton of options for savvy marketers, and it can be overwhelming. It doesn’t help that the menu and set up in the current version aren’t very intuitive, but we’ll walk you through each section so that you don’t get lost. In five minutes, you’ll be zipping around every part of the dashboard like a pro.

It’s tempting to go down a rabbit hole and look at everything that Google Analytics has to offer, from the ratio of new to returning visitors to bounce rate, and even whether your audience is on a mobile or desktop device, based in the United States or living in other countries. You can view all of that data (and more) by drilling down the left sidebar navigation.

Google Analytics Navigation

Each menu option in the Google Analytics left navigation has a carrot that can be expanded on click to get detailed insights and a report about your websites’ users, including the traffic sources and keywords that brought them to your site.

Dashboards

As you can see in the image above, you’ll have access to a basic GA dashboard, but what you see here barely scratches the surface of GA’s capabilities. You also have the option to build out custom dashboards with advanced filtering options. These custom dashboards are helpful if you need to create a report for a client or upper management about key site metrics and keywords that you’re tracking.

Realtime

In addition to viewing past data, you’ll also be able to see a report about what your users are doing in real time, including whether any keywords resulted in them visiting your site. Though you won’t get any long-term actionable insights for your business from this section of data, it can be helpful to check in with your real-time dashboard to view what’s currently going on with your website, especially if you just launched a promotion or published some ads.

Audience

Audience data will tell you about your users, including their location, devices, age, gender, browser, and even their interests.

Acquisition

This option answers the question of how visitors got to your website, and it’s one of the first places to check to see how your SEO (search engine optimization) is doing overall.

Behavior

If you’ve ever been curious about how users behave on your website, this menu option will give you lots of information, including which page people first visit and where they go once they land on your site.

Conversions

You can track conversion data by setting up goals in Google Analytics. A conversion doesn’t necessarily have to be someone purchasing your products. Any desired activity can count as a goal or conversion, from a visitor clicking a call button to filling out a form.

Unlocking the Power of Google Analytics for SEO Insights

With Google Analytics, you’ll see exactly where your traffic is coming from, and even what keywords and search terms they typed into the search engines to get to your website.   

Organic Traffic by the Numbers

Once you start putting some effort into SEO, you’ll naturally want to see if your efforts are paying off. One of the best ways to determine this is to check how much organic traffic you were getting before you began an SEO campaign. Then, you can track this and other traffic sources over time, hopefully watching it rise!

The figure above shows that Google advertising brought in the most traffic, followed closely by organic. Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium to view this information. As a reminder, this traffic volume is a direct result of how well your SEO and keywords are doing.

How to Get Your Keyword Data from Google Analytics

Now that you know how much organic traffic your website is getting, the next step is to figure out which keywords drive that traffic. Knowing this information not only alerts you to high-performing keywords, but as you’ll see, it will also show you opportunities to position specific pages higher in the search engines for the keywords that are most important for your business.

It’s a common misconception that you need to use Google Search Console and run a queries report to get this data. However, your GA account allows you to view this data without having to jump through a bunch of hoops or run complicated keyword queries.

We’ll go over some definitions to give you some context about what you see after you select Acquisition > Search Console > Queries:

Search Query

The queries option from the Search Console menu option will tell you precisely which search keywords are driving clicks, and how many clicks you’ve gotten from that search query in a given period.

Impressions

This figure represents the number of times someone saw your site in the search results for the search queries or keywords they used, even if they didn’t click over to you.

Average Position

The average position shows how high up on the search engine results page your site shows for the search terms. As you can see in the figure above, you don’t have to be in the number one position (or even on the first page of Google) to get clicks for your target keywords, but the higher you do appear, the more organic search traffic you’re likely to get.

CTR

Short for click-through rate, CTR is the percentage of people who saw your site appear in the search engines that clicked on it. This statistic in the Search Console can tell you how well your content resonates with searchers.

For example, if 100 people did a keyword search for “martini glasses” in Google and saw your site in the search results, and five of those people clicked on the link to visit your site, then the CTR for that keyword would be 5%.

It’s not uncommon for your top-performing keywords to be branded, and this chart will show whether or not that’s the case for your websites. You’ll also be able to see at a glance if some of the search terms and keywords that you’ve been trying to optimize for are climbing in the ranks.

Taking Google Analytics Keywords Insights to the Next Level

After getting information about your overall keyword performance, the next step is to look at your landing pages to see which ones are getting the most traffic. The column titles are similar, but you’re going to interpret the data differently.

Clicks

In many cases, your home page will attract the most traffic, but it’s also worth looking at the other top-performing pages on your site to see if there are one or more keywords driving traffic. Are those pages up to date with current content? Can you take advantage of this traffic by linking to other areas on your site from this page – perhaps an article or additional resources?

Impressions

A high number of impressions indicates that the page is performing well in search, but if the clickthrough rate is low, it means that those eyeballs aren’t resulting in more traffic. Make sure that you’ve got an accurate and compelling meta description relevant to the keywords to encourage people to click on your content.

Average Position

Here, we encourage you to look for pages that have an average position of 4 or 5. This indicates they’re performing well on search and have some authority, but there could be some things you can do to improve the page. Is the page in need of an update? Can you make it slightly longer to sprinkle in more keywords? Can you work on outreach to get more backlinks to a useful article?

Advanced Filtering for the Win

If your site has many pages or blog posts, figuring out which pages to further optimize based on the average position can be a tedious process. We’ve got a hack to make it easier, though.

Step 1: Turn on Advanced Filtering by clicking “advanced.”

Step 2: Look for pages that have a high number of impressions with an average rank of either 4 or 5 by selecting the relevant Secondary dimensions and entering impressions and average positions in the appropriate fields (shown below).

 

Find Out Which Keywords Drive Traffic to a Specific Page

If you’re curious about which keywords are bringing visitors to your home page or your best blog post, you can also access this information in Google Analytics.

Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. You’ll see a list of all your site’s pages sorted by sessions. Select the page that you’re interested in getting keyword data about and select Keyword as a secondary dimension. If you are running advertising, you’ll also want to sort by traffic type to exclude paid ad campaigns.

Utilizing Google Trends

Not sure which keywords are worth the trouble? Google Trends is a keyword research tool that can help you prioritize your SEO efforts. 

For example, using the keyword “martini glasses,” we can see that more searchers are entering this phrase into Google than in previous months. If your website caters to customers with a related interest, you can work on getting both organic search traffic and paid search traffic to this keyword.

The Bottom Line

Google Analytics is an incredible tool that delivers powerful and actionable insights, but there’s always the next level. If you want to spy on competitors effectively, you’re going to need a tool that offers competitive insights. Keyword.com does all that and more. Track up 1,500 keywords from your competitors, including Local GMB Tracking functionality. Sign up today for a 7-day free trial.

 

 

If you’ve been trying to claw your way to the top of the search engines without any luck, we’ve got a solution for you that requires no technical know-how, no soliciting for backlinks, no formal SEO training, and no black hat tactics.

 

The trick? Use long-tail keywords as part of your SEO to boost your organic traffic while driving more high-converting traffic to your site.

Long-tail keywords can expand your reach, skyrocket your traffic, and dramatically increase your revenue. Plus, they have less competition Go Digital Brand employed this strategy and saw exponential growth over the course of a 12-month period.

What Are Long-tail Keywords?

Let’s back up for a second… What is a long-tail keyword, anyway?

We need to start by dispelling a persistent myth. Contrary to popular belief, long-tail keywords are not keywords that are longer in length. Rather, a long-tail keyword is a term that has a low search volume.

A lower volume of search traffic doesn’t mean that there’s no demand and no one is searching for those words on the Internet. The opposite is actually the case. According to a big data report from Ahrefs, over 92% of the more than 1.9 billion keywords in their database receive 10 or fewer searches per month.

This means that the overwhelming majority of keyword searches are for very unpopular keywords. In fact, despite the trillions of searches performed each year, a full 15% of them are queries never before seen.

Granted, there are still millions of keyword terms that get tons of queries like “motorcycles” and “home gym,” but those high-competition keywords are practically impossible to rank for unless you’re a major player. 

Let’s illustrate this search demand with a graph, known in the industry as the search demand curve.

Those popular, simple keywords show up at the “fat head” of the search demand curve. What will really move the needle with your SEO efforts, however, is creating content and blog posts using long-tail keywords, which show at the tail end of this curve.

So, as you can see, long-tail keywords get their name because they look like long tails at the end of the search demand curve.

Another Misconception About Long-tail Keywords

What do you think gets more search volume? “Keto diet menu” or “keto diet for beginners”? You might be tempted to think that “keto diet menu” gets more search queries because it’s shorter, but “keto diet for beginners” has more than twice the search volume. 

Examples like this show that just because a search query is long or short, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will get less or more search volume.

To really hammer this point home, let’s look at search volumes for a five-word keyword phrase: “bed bath and beyond coupon.”

Compare this to the single word, “widdershins,” which means a direction contrary to the sun’s course. This word gets just a few thousand searches per month.

Over the years, people have gotten savvier in their searches. They’ve learned that the more specific their query, the higher chances they’ll find what they’re looking for. As a result, longer search phrases with specific keywords are becoming increasingly popular, though they may still qualify as long-tail keywords if they’re not getting a lot of search volume.

These search terms and keyphrases can be gold because if you rank for them, then you have basically read the mind of your searcher and can win a customer or fan, increasing your site’s conversion rates.

How to Find Long-tail Keywords

Now that you know you should be using long-tail keywords as part of the SEO strategy for your company, what’s the best way to go about finding the right long-tail keyword opportunities?

Here are seven ways to find winning long-tail keywords:

1. Google Autocomplete

As you type a “head” term into the Google search bar, you’ll get a list of SEO suggestions related to that phrase that will provide you a starting point for keyword ideas.

For example, if you type “keto diet” into the browser, you’ll get a variety of ideas that might qualify as long-tail keywords.

You can even take this one step further by finding long-tail keywords that expand on your additional phrases. For example, if you type “keto diet breakfast ideas” into the search bar, you get even more inspiration.

2. Google’s “People Also Ask”

As people have begun typing entire questions into search bars, Google has begun gathering data to help you get ideas of the questions people are asking related to a search term.

3. Google’s “Searches Related To”

As you scroll to the bottom of the search results page, you’ll also see other related keyword phrases that can inspire you and give you ideas for what you might want to rank for.

4. Google Keyword Planner

There are a lot of keyword research tool options out there, but Google’s is free.

After you enter a phrase, whether it’s a seed keyword or a long-tail keyword, you’ll get a list of hundreds of related keywords to inspire you

Sort by Competition so that you can focus on the phrases with lower search volumes and low competition. Here, we can see that there’s low competition for keyword phrases like “keto at olive garden,” “keto at ihop,” and “keto at kfc.” If your website is about the keto diet, you can attract a lot of search traffic by creating a blog post series about how to eat keto at popular restaurants.

5. Answer the Public

Another powerful free SEO tool is Answer the Public. This tool will give you a wealth of inspiration for questions and long-tail keywords that people are typing into search. You could theoretically create an entire SEO plan using this tool alone.

6. Talk to Your Customers

You can try to get inside your customers’ heads and think about how they might search for your product or service, but the best way to get this information is to ask them directly. What keywords or phrases do they use when searching for your company or describing your product? You might get some insights here that you wouldn’t find otherwise.

7. Visit Online Forums and Communities

Observe online communities and industry forums to see how your target visitors talk. What pain points are they experiencing? What questions do they have? What language do they use? If you don’t know what online communities to join, start with Facebook Groups or Reddit.

How to Open the Traffic Floodgates with Long-tail Keywords

You know by now that long-tail keywords are easier to rank for than a head term with one or two keywords.

The reason for this is two-fold:

1. Competition – More people are trying to rank for simple, broad keywords. Plus, these head terms can form the root of several pages, which is also referred to as a parent topic.

For example, the phrase “keto diet” shows 222,000,000 results in Google, making it highly competitive, while “keto at ihop” returns only 600,000 results. Instead of exiling yourself to “no man’s land” in Google’s rankings, it’s a better idea to focus on long-tail keywords that have a more reasonable level of competition.

2. Backlinks – Google heavily weighs the number of high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your page when it decides where to place you in the search engine results page.

Again, the big guys with well-established sites and large link building budgets are going to outrank you for head terms almost every time because they’ve been able to collect hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks for their pages.

Next Steps

Using the seven resources above, find your ideal term and type it into Google. Visit each of the websites that shows up on page one of the search engine. These are the top 10 results for your target keyphrases. Study that content and look for ways you can make it better. Is the information outdated? Incomplete? Not very useful?

Your goal should be to make your blog post or page for that long-tail keyword on your site better than every single piece of content that’s ranking on page one. Accomplish that, and it won’t be long before you’re claiming the top spot for those less competitive keywords.

Is It Worth Your Time?

If this strategy for ranking for long-tail keywords sounds like a lot of work, it is. At first glance, you might be wondering why you’d bother creating an entire page on your website for a search term that gets only a few dozen (if that) monthly searches in the United States.

The most compelling reason is that the people typing these search phrases into Google have a very specific need, and you can be the one to meet it.

For example, gallery walls are becoming increasingly popular in people’s homes, but there are untapped content opportunities. Let’s say you offer custom gallery wall services or provide tutorials about how to create your own gallery wall, you could potentially rank for keywords like “random photo wall” or “pink gallery wall.”

Even if each keyword phrase only gets a handful of clicks per month, you have a high chance of ranking in a top spot in the search engines, capturing website visitors that are very targeted.

Sure, you’ll have to create a lot of pages to rank for each long-tail keyword. But, look at it this way – it’s still less work than trying to compete with thousands (or millions) of websites for a high-volume but generic keyword phrase like “book.”

The Bottom Line

Other than discussing getting data from the first page of Google, we didn’t talk much about how competition plays into your keyword strategy.

If you’re wondering if your competitors are ranking for (or trying to rank) for words related to your target long-tail keywords, take a look at Keyword.com. In addition to getting search volumes for your desired phrases, you can also see if your competitors are also targeting those same or other long-tail keywords, as well what their keyword rankings are. Sign up today for a 7-day free trial.

 

With ad costs on the rise and the barriers to entry to launching a website virtually non-existent, SEO is more important than ever.

To succeed in the ultra-competitive world of SEO, however, you have to be diligent. You should also embrace the concept of “work smarter, not harder.”

For example, you could create virtual mountains of content until you’ve exhausted your budget, but if no one sees it, then that effort was wasted.

As the saying goes, you can’t track what you don’t measure. And, if you’re not measuring it, there’s no way to improve it.

Throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks is not a strategy. Blindly hoping that your latest blog posts rank is not a strategy, either.

To ensure success in the SEO game, you need to know how to track your SEO rankings. In this guide, we’ll show you how to do exactly that.

Why You Should Track SEO Rankings

SEO done right is an investment. If you put a dollar into an SEO strategy, you should be able to pull $3 (or $5 or $10 or $100) out.

To get a pat on the back from your boss or convince a client to keep writing checks, you have to able to prove that what you do works. Tracking SEO rankings allows you to do that while also identifying opportunities and areas for improvement. Those insights can be incredibly valuable in both the short and long-term.

The Importance of Achieving High SEO Rankings

It seems like every few years, a rant goes viral about SEO being dead. In our opinion, those viewpoints are held by people that have gone all-in on a black hat or outdated strategy and failed. What they don’t account for is that SEO is always changing, and you’ve got to stay alert to remain relevant.

Regardless of how someone might “feel” about SEO, there are four vital reasons to track SEO rankings diligently.

Organic Traffic Has a High ROI

While it’s true that organic traffic is not free (content creation and SEO strategies take work), it tends to be dramatically less expensive than advertising. It also has the potential to generate the most traffic. For example, how often do you click on an ad versus a piece of content that has the answer to a question you’ve been asking?

Organic traffic also tends to be high intent, and it doesn’t cost you anything once the content is created and optimized. Whether you get one click or a million clicks, you’re not going to get a “traffic” bill in the mail.

Traffic as a Result of SEO is Long-Lasting

Once you put in the effort to create a web page, the bulk of the work is done. Sure, you have to check your rankings and continue to get backlinks and optimize content, but it’s not like advertising where you have to pay to play. The second you stop feeding the advertising meter, so to speak, your traffic from that source dries up.

Organizations Should Strive for Continuous Improvement

Every organization needs to stay sharp and always be on the lookout for opportunities to get better. Those that rest on their laurels are soon dinosaurs in the industry as younger, hungrier, and more motivated competitors come to eat your lunch, or in this case, rankings.

Still not convinced that you should always be innovating and improving? Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Xerox, and Myspace are just a few warnings of what happens if you get complacent in the top spot. The search engines are no different. If you stop tracking your SEO rankings, you could end up on page 10 of Google (or worse) for a keyword that used to be your most profitable.

High Rankings Justify the Expense of SEO

When you track your SEO rankings and see your site climb in the search engines for those ultra-competitive keywords, then all that time creating top-notch content and shilling for quality backlinks is worthwhile.

However, if you’re pouring money into content creation and outreach without measuring results, then it’s tough to argue the necessity of these efforts. When executives or clients don’t understand what you’re doing, and you’re unable to show them tangible results, then SEO does, indeed, become dead. At least for that organization.

How To Track SEO Rankings

Before we get into the tools and methods to track SEO rankings, it’s important to do some planning. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself bombarded with data and not knowing the first thing about what to do with it.

We’ll walk you through this process step-by-step so that you can be organized and systematic in your approach from day one.

Step 1 – Establish Your Goals

Even seasoned SEO professionals can get stuck in this first step. It’s not unusual for an SEO to ask their client, “what keywords do you want to rank for?”

The client might stare back blankly and say, “Isn’t it your job to tell me that?”

Some savvy clients and SEO teams have already established their top priority keywords, but if you haven’t gotten to that step yet, there are several ways to do this.

You can start by checking to see which keywords you currently rank for. As Maya Angelou famously says, “If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.

Another approach is to take a look at how your competitors are performing.

We recommend both.

To check out your SEO rankings, one of the best places to start is in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).

There’s a wealth of data that you can access for free. From here, you can see which search queries drive traffic to your site, how many clicks and impressions you get, the CTR (click-through rate), and your position. You also have the option to filter by date ranges and compare periods to each other.

To get an idea of where to optimize your current efforts, try this trick:

Filter the report by position and choose only keywords that are in position 8 and higher. If you have several keywords where you’re on the first page of Google, but toward the bottom, it’s smart to start your SEO efforts on getting ranked higher for those keywords. You’ve already got some traction, so it makes sense to see what you can do to climb higher.

Once you’ve identified those search queries, view the pages that are ranking for that query, and examine each one to figure out how to optimize them. It could be on-page work, adding internal links, or doing outreach for backlinks.

This helps if you’re already ranking for some keywords, but this approach doesn’t give you competitor insights or any guidance if you’re just getting started with content.

To get next-level insights, you’ll need a bonafide keyword rank tracker.

Here’s an example of how keyword.com can be used to get competitive insights.

Let’s say you’re in the personal finance space, and you want to know what keywords some of your competitors rank for and how well they’re doing.

This report breaks it down for you:

In addition to seeing competitive keywords, you’ll also get insights into search volume and search results.

The other thing you can do is view the SERP to verify the location and also view the actual web page to see how easy it might be to overtake this particular page in search.

Step 2 – Identify Key Metrics

There’s a lot of talk in the SEO world about metrics, but the key to success is focusing on the metrics that matter. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in weeds and not see the forest through the trees.

Though every business is different, typically, the most useful metrics include:

Organic search volume

Use Google Analytics to figure out how much of your traffic is from organic search versus other channels like direct, advertising, referral, etc.

In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Channels

From here, you can drill down further to see how your organic search traffic is performing.

Here’s where Google Analytics fails most businesses.

As you can see in this example, more than 95% of the traffic specifies no keyword, so this tool won’t give you a clear picture of which keywords are driving traffic. You can potentially stack this with Google Search Console to get insights into this information.

Conversion rates

In Google Analytics, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve got conversion tracking set up to measure which pages are bringing in the most revenue. Make sure you filter based on organic search results, not paid, referral, or direct traffic.

Depending on your business model, you might also want to count conversion actions such as email signups, phone calls, and form submissions.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Google Search Console gives you important data about the click-through rate for a variety of search queries. There are some general guidelines you can expect for a healthy click-through rate if your titles and meta descriptions are written well.

If you’re noticing a low click-through rate despite a high position, check the SERP. It could be due to a number of factors, including:

• Top results taken up by ads
• Top results taken up videos
• Top results taken up by a featured snippet
• Top results being taken up by “People also ask”
• A poor title tag and meta description

Bounce rate and time on page

These metrics are relative, but they can be helpful in showing you how useful a page is for your audience. For example, if you have a pillar blog post, but the bounce rate is 90% and the time on page is 10 seconds, then there might be something wrong with the content. Is it leading to a 404 page, is the content outdated, does the page take forever to load?

On the other hand, if you have a page where people are spending a lot of time, that is a clear signal that your users are getting value from it.

Load Speed

Check your site load speeds, which is an often-overlooked factor in search rankings. A slow-loading site not only affects your performance with the Google algorithm, but it also results in a higher bounce rate as visitors have better things to do than wait for your website to load. The higher your bounce rate, the further you get penalized in search engine rankings.

Pingdom is a free tool that gives you site speed measurements and tactical recommendations at a glance.

Step 3 – Choose Your Tools

We’ve discussed a couple of free tools to get you started: Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Though they can both be useful, they have crippling limitations, which we’ve discussed briefly.

In addition to what we’ve already covered, Google Analytics and Google Search Console also have the following flaws:

• Getting and exporting data is a very manual and tedious process.
• You only get Google data.
• You can’t track your competitors.
• There’s no keyword volume data. Even though Google does offer keyword planner, it only offers ranges, and even that data is notoriously inaccurate.

Still, if you want a quick and dirty view of your own performance, Google Search Console is a decent place to start. However, if you want competitive analytics, you’re going to have to upgrade to a paid tool.

When it comes to choosing a paid tool, you have a lot of options. When we developed Keyword.com back in 2011, there was no Ahrefs or SEMrush. Moz had yet to create the suite of tools they have today. Over the years, we’ve continued to improve Keyword.com (previously SerpBook), and it’s infinitely more affordable.

Keyword.com also has a feature almost no one can compete with. 100% verifiable accuracy. For any keyword ranking you’re tracking, you can view the real third-party verified results.

Step 4 – Measure Performance

Once you’ve established your top hundred, thousand, or million keywords, it’s time to start tracking their performance.

Depending on your goals and your niche’s competitiveness, you might want to run reports daily, weekly, or monthly.

One of the things that makes Keyword.com so special is that you can run virtually unlimited refreshes to get data in real-time. You’ll also get alerts whenever one of the keywords you’re tracking rises or falls in the SERP.

Perhaps the most important part of tracking your SEO rankings is creating and distributing reports.

You can have user-friendly and easy to read reports delivered directly to your inbox or your clients’ email addresses on any schedule you choose. White label your reports with your agency name at no extra charge.

By having the ability to disseminate and share information in a way that’s simple to understand, you can explain and demonstrate your results, having total confidence that you’ve reached or goals. And, if you’re falling short, you’ll know exactly where to optimize.

Step 5 – Optimize

There’s a lot of information you can pull from a keyword rank tracker. Depending on what you see, your strategy will vary, but here are a few things to look for as you track SEO rankings.

• Look for changes in performance. If you’re rising to the tops of the ranks, take a look at who else is leading the results and see how you might be doing better than they are. If you’ve dropped in the SERP, see who’s overtaken you and look for what they might have done to earn a better ranking.
• Watch your competitors like a hawk. Most keyword rank trackers allow you to add a list of competitors and relevant keywords to track. Keyword.com will even suggest competitors with high rankings. Or enter the domain of a competitor you’re closely monitoring.

• Seek out new opportunities. When you start a new project with a keyword rank tracker, you’ll be prompted to enter your target keywords. As you’re going through this process, the tools will recommend related words that you might want to monitor. You can easily add these to your list and begin tracking them without any commitment to put in any work.

By watching these keywords, you’ll be able to see their search volume and any competitors that are also going after these terms.

Conclusion

Before keyword rank trackers existed, the process of tracking SEO rankings was a manual process that involved a lot of guesswork. Now, there’s no shortage of tools available, but the trick is knowing how to best harness their power.

No matter how robust your tool is, it’s still important for you to do the hard work of determining your goals and identifying the right opportunities. Keyword.com bridges the gap by helping businesses of all sizes, from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 companies track their SEO rankings with 100% accuracy and on-demand updates.

I’m excited to share that GrowthRobotics is now joining Keyword.com.

I created Keyword.com in 2012 as a simple tool to help track SEO rankings, and since then, thousands of SEO professionals and agencies have been leveraging this to win more SEO rankings and clients.

We are currently increasing our efforts to help SEO agencies with GrowthRobotics.

What does GrowthRobotics do?

How will GrowthRobotics be billed?

This will be a separate product, and will not be related to Keyword.com

What is the future roadmap of GrowthRobotics?

We will be making significant investments to improve the user experience and onboarding, and redoing the entire application to make it better, cheaper, and faster than any other solutions out there.

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