Top 6 Reasons to Track Your Rankings in a Conversion Obsessed World

In our previous Whitespark Weekly episode, Why Do I See Different Rankings Than What My Rank Tracker Reports?, we discussed the accuracy of rank tracking software and why you often see a lot of variations and fluctuations in your reported rankings. Today we’re discussing why you should track your ranking results and the 6 biggest benefits of doing so.

Video Transcript

Hey there, Darren here from Whitespark.ca! So many businesses and agencies don’t bother tracking rankings because conversions are a much better metric for measuring SEO success. I agree completely, conversions are the metric that matters and the metric that you should be reporting. But there’s still many good reasons to track rankings and I’m going to lay them out for you in this video today.

#1. Helps You Monitor and Uncover Trends
The first question that rank tracking can help you answer is, are we generally trending up? Or are we generally trending down? Rank tracking software works wonderfully to show you this. 

If you’re an agency, you can say, this is where your rankings were when we started doing all this SEO work. We’ve done all this SEO work and this is where you are today. So rank tracking can help you demonstrate the benefits that you’re giving to your clients, or the impact of the SEO work that you’re doing yourself in-house.

#2. Compare Keyword Visibility to Find Opportunities
Another question that rank trackers can help you answer is, what terms are we ranking well for? And you can do comparisons. For example, you can see that for the company Action Muffler, ‘muffler’ related terms, were doing better than ‘brake’ related terms. That could be an optimization opportunity for you to improve your on-page optimization for the brake terms. 

#3. Track The Impact of Your SEO Work
Another question rank tracking will help you answer is, did this change that we made have a positive impact on our rankings over time? You can definitely see that with a rank tracker, like in the case below you can see that on January 10, you know, there’s less green. So in terms of the aggregate number of terms ranking in positions 1, 2, 3. Then if you look at March 10, and April 10, that number keeps going up.

You can see that whatever changes were made in January, they had a big impact and a real positive impact. You can track those kinds of things and understand the impact of your SEO work. 

#4. Monitor the Impact of Major Algorithm Updates
Sometimes you can use rank tracking software to identify whether or not a recent algorithm update had an impact on your rankings. As you can see in this example, this business is doing well, then an algorithm update hit and their rankings plummeted a little bit. Rank tracking software can alert you to that. 

#5. Competitor Comparison
Another question is, how does your business compare with your competitors? Rank tracking software really helps you see how you’re performing versus your competitors. You can see charts like this where from January to April, this business rankings went up and their competitor’s rankings went down. 

That’s obviously what you want to see. And rank tracking software really helps you keep an eye on where your rankings are at versus your competitors. It’s really important as a measurement tool to understand, in general, how you are trending. 

#6. Identify Optimization Opportunities
One final thing that rank tracking can be really valuable for is identifying specific optimization opportunities. We can see that in the local finder results, we’ve got a number of terms ranking in positions 1, 2, and 3; that means they’re actually in the local pack. But there’s a bunch of terms that are also ranking in positions 4 to 10. Any of these terms in positions 4 to 10, they’re basically just on the cusp of breaking into the local pack, which would be extremely valuable for this business if they can get into the pack.

We can see terms like ‘radiator repair’, ‘exhaust system repair’, those are optimization opportunities if these are terms that are important. We want to improve rankings for them. So when you see this, you can say great, these are terms that we want to optimize for and improve optimization on our website, and hopefully push them into the local pack. Then with the rank tracking software, you can measure that impact over time after you make the changes. 

I hope that I’ve shown you some of the many benefits of rank tracking and how we’re tracking rankings in order to track trends over time, which helps you identify opportunities and measure the impact of your SEO work. 

Do you track rankings for your business or for your clients? Let us know in the comments below. If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to like the video on YouTube.