Congratulations! You’ve just published a new blog post targeting a specific keyword. But the job doesn’t end here — you need to track the content performance over time to ensure it still ranks well in the SERPs for your target keyword.
Effective keyword monitoring is not a once-off task. It requires ongoing effort to ensure that your strategy stays up-to-date and your website stays relevant. Here’s how to do it:
Setting up automated alerts is an essential first step in ongoing keyword monitoring. There are several tools available that can help you set up alerts for your target keywords.
For example, Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to monitor the web for mentions of your brand or other keywords. Simply enter your target keyword, and Google will notify you whenever it appears in new content online. This can help you stay on top of mentions of your brand, as well as identify new opportunities to engage with your audience.
Other tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs also offer automated alerts for keyword monitoring. These tools allow you to track your keyword rankings, monitor backlinks, and receive notifications whenever there are changes to your rankings or backlink profile. This can be a powerful way to stay on top of your SEO performance and identify areas for improvement.
By monitoring your keyword rankings over time, you can gain insight into how your SEO efforts are performing and identify opportunities to improve. You can set up keyword tracking in Google Analytics or use a third-party tool like Keyword.com to uncover more data insights — such as share of voice, related keyword suggestions, and historical SERP performance.
In addition to tracking your own rankings, it’s also important to monitor the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords. This can help you stay on top of changes in the search landscape, identify new competitors, and spot opportunities to better optimize your content according to search intent.
For example, if you notice that a particular keyword is starting to generate more featured snippets or People Also Ask (PAA), you may want to adjust your content to target that feature. Similarly, if you notice that a new competitor is starting to rank well for a particular keyword, you may want to adjust your content or link-building strategy to compete more effectively.
Further reading: Comprehensive guide to rich results and SERP features
Analyzing competitor keywords can give you valuable insights into their online strategy and help you improve your own. By understanding what keywords your competitors are targeting, you can identify gaps in your own strategy and find new opportunities to attract more traffic to your website.
Tools like SEMrush and Seobility offer competitor analysis features that allow you to see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, as well as the content that they are creating to target those keywords. This can help you identify new opportunities for content creation and link building, as well as adjust your own SEO strategy to better compete with your rivals.
Ongoing keyword monitoring is only effective if you use the insights you gain to adjust your SEO strategy. Analyzing your rankings data, monitoring the SERPs, and tracking your competitors’ keywords gives you valuable insights into how to optimize your content and improve your rankings.
For example, if you notice that a particular keyword generates a lot of traffic, you may want to create more content around that topic. Similarly, if you notice that a particular competitor is outperforming you for a particular keyword, you may want to adjust your content or link-building strategy to better compete with them.
