Why use Keyword Tracking tools?

In this article, we will cover an important topic for the SEO project, which is the monitoring of keyword ranking. As important as monitoring the results of the project at the end of each month is also tracking the evolution of keywords (Rank Tracker) in organic positions over the weeks.

At Gear SEO, we have a keyword tracking tool, with which we carry out the configuration from the first day of the project. This tool has two forms of tracking:

Weekly report submissions: every week, we send an email with the current overview of keyword placement and also a comparison with the previous week.

Follow-up link: we provide a follow-up link with a panel of the evolution of keyword positions that can be accessed at any time to check information about the positioning of keywords in the SEO project.

How does the keyword tool work?

First, we set up the tracking tool according to the following criteria:

Between 80 and 200 keywords:a website is usually related to more than 1,000 keywords in search results. To track the movement of all keywords in a given period, we use our monthly reports containing all of them. However, for this specific supervision, we only select the keywords that we consider essential for the project.

These are the keywords that will play the role of the campaign’s thermometer, whose evolution will be tracked weekly, assuming that their behavior may influence the behavior of the other keywords.

2 to 3 competitors in the segment: we also include 2 to 3 competitors to follow their evolution on the same keywords that we are tracking for our domain. We use this number of competitors because it is enough to make the comparisons and also facilitates the visualization in the reports, avoiding visual pollution.

The choice of competitors can be made through direct competition in the segment or through the incidence of keywords among the most common competitors. In some cases, we may have more than 3 competitors mapped for a more general view of the amount of indexed keywords that they have in each positioning range (1st position, Top 2-5, Top 6-10, 2nd page and so on).

Once the tool is configured, emails will always be sent weekly on Sundays. We send on weekends, so it is always possible to compare with the period of the previous week and analyze the evolution of keywords in Google organic search and in comparison to the competition.

Based on the settings above and the report, it is possible to analyze the following conditions in an SEO project:

Sudden increase in keyword positions: when a percentage of keywords substantially increases their positions, we can take this as a starting point for further analysis, a possible Google algorithm update or some technical task that has been implemented to promote the growth of the project as a whole.

There is also a sudden increase in keywords when, for some reason, we are not publishing the content with the correct frequency, and we have to recover the pace of publication.

Sudden decline in keyword positions: when a percentage of keywords substantially lowers their positions, we can take this as a starting point for further analysis, a possible Google algorithm update or even some movement from the competition promoting their respective SEO projects as well.

Another case in which there may be a sudden decline is when our site indexes for keywords that have no relevance within the context of our customers. This is very common when we started the SEO project in a domain that already had a certain number of keywords. Therefore, there is this normal movement of decline in the general number of indexed keywords, but the counterpart is that new keywords that really make sense for the business will be indexed.

Changes in the competitors’ keywords ranking: when a percentage of competitive keywords has increased or decreased substantially in organic search results, we can create action plans to minimize or maximize results in the medium / long term.

How to access the reports?

If you are already our customer conducting a complete SEO project, you will receive every week an email with the main keywords and the tracking of the competition. There is also the option to directly access the reports on our tracking platform.

The link for direct access to the platform is available in the SEO project newsletters that we send every month. If you do not have an SEO project with us, please contact us to start as soon as possible!