Let’s imagine that you've just launched your website. You're incredibly proud of your sleek design, intuitive user experience, and informative content. But a month goes by and your site is getting minimal organic traffic. Even after all the effort you've invested, you still find yourself buried on the tenth page of Google. Sounds like a nightmare, right?
This exact situation is common for many new websites. That’s why monitoring organic search rank is essential, particularly for new sites aiming to make their mark.
In this article, I list the steps to check organic rankings and ways to monitor organic rank. But before that, let's first briefly learn what organic ranking is.
What is Organic Search Rank?
Organic search rank refers to the position a website holds in the search engine results pages (SERPs). These results are the natural, unpaid listings that Google deems most relevant and useful to a user's search query.
Monitoring your organic ranks is paramount in gauging the health of your website's SEO efforts when aiming to acquire new visitors or maintain existing ones.
Why is Organic Rank Important?
Whether you're a newbie or a pro, ongoing rank tracking will give you a solid grasp on your website's SEO performance, consequently enabling you to make necessary tweaks and improvements.
It’s essential to monitor organic rank because of these main reasons:
- Boost Visibility: Better organic rank means more visibility. The goal of every website is to appear on the first page of search engine results. By monitoring your rank, you can employ necessary SEO practices to climb to the top.
- Increase Trust: Visibility is futile if users don't trust your site. High rank generally comes with perceived credibility, leading to improved user trust.
- Drive Organic Traffic: High visibility and increased trust naturally drive more organic traffic to your site.
👉You may want to read: Why Is Your Website Not Showing Up on Google? How to Troubleshoot it?
What is Organic Traffic KPI?
Organic Traffic KPI, otherwise known as Key Performance Indicator, measures the number of visitors who reach your website by organic search. This KPI is a formidable indicator of how effective your SEO strategies are. It's one of the significant benefits that make people want to know how to check and monitor organic search rankings.
Hence, monitoring your Organic Traffic KPI can give you a lot of insight into how your site is performing and where your efforts need to be focused. Here's why:
- Indicates SEO Performance: The Organic Traffic KPI is a direct measure of how well your SEO strategy is working. The more organic traffic you have, the better your SEO performance.
- Shows User Relevance: A steady increase in organic traffic suggests that your content is relevant and useful to users. It means that you are successfully meeting the user's search intent.
- Encourages Quality Content: Keeping a keen eye on this KPI pushes you to consistently create high-quality, SEO-friendly content. The end goal? Climbing the ranking ladder.
How to Monitor Organic Rank with 5 Ways?
Monitoring your website’s organic rank is an ongoing process, not a one-time task. This type of vigilance gives you an upper hand, helping you respond to changing trends and practices in the digital world.
Not sure where to start? Here's our detailed guide on which methods and steps to take to monitor your organic rank and which tools you can use in order to complete them.
1. SEOmator
A comprehensive SEO platform, SEOmator provides various free SEO tools to monitor your organic rank. You can easily use free Google SERP Rank Checker to see your website's ranking for specific keywords in real time.
Also, if you want to check your organic search ranks in Bing’s search engine result pages, then SEOmator provides another free tool for it, free Bing SERP Rank Checker.
Enter the Web URL: Simply type your URL into the input field to start monitoring its organic ranking for a specific keyword.
Enter Keyword: Here, you can enter the keyword that you want to check for its position on the search engine result page.
Select Country: For the final step, select the country in which you want to monitor your organic rank since your ranks may vary in different countries’ SERPs.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is one of essential tools to keep an eye on your SEO health and organic rankings. You can track your website’s visibility, click-through rates (CTRs), and indexation issues. Here is how to do it:
Set Up Your Account: First, you need to set up your GSC account and verify your website.
Access Performance Report: Within GSC, navigate to the 'Search Results’ section and then click on 'Search Analysis'. This will provide you with a detailed report of your website’s performance.
Analyze Your Keywords: Here, you can view data on your website's top keywords, their average ranking positions, impressions, clicks, and CTRs.
3. Google Analytics 4
Google Search Console and Google Analytics, when paired, offer a wealth of information about your website's organic performance.
Link Your Accounts: Connect your GSC and Google Analytics accounts.
Access Reports: Accessing the 'Reports' tab in Google Analytics, and then 'Search Console' reveals comprehensive data provided by the pairing of both tools.
Evaluate Your Data: Analyze this data to determine the most effective pages on your website, individual page performance, and user engagement patterns.
4. Google My Business
For local businesses, Google My Business (GMB) is a gold mine. It helps your business to appear in local search results for queries specific to your products or services. Here’s how to use it:
Create a ‘Google My Business’ Account: Sign up and fill out your business's information accurately.
Verify Your Listing: Google needs to trust that your business is legal and exists where it says it does. Therefore, go through their verification process.
Monitor Insights: Regularly review insights provided by Google My Business. These insights showcase how customers found you, where they're from, and how they interacted with your listing.
👉 You may want to read: How to Add Keywords to Google My Business
5. Matomo
Matomo is one of the most popular website analytics tools. To start using it for monitoring organic search ranks, establish an account, then add your website to the Matomo by following the instructions.
Monitor Your Data: Matomo presents your website's data in a simplified manner, enabling you to monitor your SEO efforts easily and effectively. Use these insights to shape and inform your strategy.
Customize: Matomo offers a range of customizable options that let you tailor dashboards, reports, or metrics. Use these to better cater to your unique needs and goals.
How to Calculate Organic Ranking in 5 Steps?
Calculating organic ranking involves understanding where your web pages are positioned on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for particular keywords. But it's not as simple as seeing your page as number three on Google.
A plethora of factors, including geographical location, browser history, and device types, influence organic ranking. Algorithmic changes further add to this dynamic setting.
However, with the magic of a well-structured process and smart usage of tools, we can effectively track and calculate our organic ranking. Here's how you can achieve this in five steps:
Step 1: Identify Keywords to Track
The first step towards calculating organic ranking is identifying the keywords central to your website’s offerings. These can range from short-tail to long-tail keywords, and from generic to highly specific terms.
If your business sells handmade candles, your list might include keywords such as 'handmade candles', 'organic wax candles', 'hand-poured scented candles', and 'biodegradable pillar candles.'
👉 You may want to read: How to Find Niche Keywords in 7 Steps
Step 2: Monitor Keyword Rankings
This is where rank tracking tools come into play. Set up your keywords in a tracking tool. These tools provide you a snapshot of where you rank for these terms and how your positions fluctuate over time.
Step 3: Monitor Search Traffic
One crucial aspect when calculating organic ranking is analyzing the amount of organic search traffic these keywords bring to your site. This again can be done with any tool you prefer.
Step 4: Incorporate Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
An essential metric to factor into your calculations is the click-through rate (CTR). This data presents the percentage of users who click on your website after it appears in their search results. Higher the position on SERPs, higher is the expected CTR.
Step 5: Combine the Insights
Your final call is to synthesize the gathered information from steps 1-4 to calculate your organic ranking. A high rank coupled with strong organic search traffic and a healthy CTR signal success.
The Future of Organic Ranking
Stepping into the year 2024, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new horizon, a vibrant frontier that encapsulates the future of organic ranking. One thing is certain - SEO is nowhere near static.
It’s a living, breathing entity that evolves relentlessly to better meet the needs of users and the internet's ever-changing ecosystem. Let's unfold what the future holds for organic ranking.
1. Mobile-first Indexing: Google rollouts mobile-first indexing for all sites in its listings, meaning Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Craft a mobile-optimized website to stand the chance of getting ranked high.
2. Voice Search: With the advent of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, voice search is on an uprising trend. In 2024, optimizing your content for voice search is indeed necessary.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Google’s AI algorithm, RankBrain, interprets the user's queries to deliver search results that cater to the user intent, cluing in on context and providing more personalized responses. It's predicted that AI will play a major role in shaping the future of organic search.
4. E-E-A-T Principle: Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a core part of their Quality Raters’ Guidelines. Websites that demonstrate EAT could potentially experience improved organic visibility.
5. Helpful Content: Helpful, engaging, and quality content will continue to reign supreme. Focus on creating content that resonates with your audience, solves their problem, and also offers an enjoyable reading experience.
6. Page Experience: Google implements page experience as a ranking factor. This framework includes Core Web Vitals, which aim to understand the site's loading speed, interactivity, and stability of the content as it loads. Improving page experience can give you an advantage over competition in SERPs.
👉 You may want to read: How to Fix 'Crawled-Currently Not Indexed' Issue
The year 2024 brings with it new opportunities and challenges in the realm of SEO. It’s clear that the future of organic ranking lies in crafting personalized, user-focused experiences coupled with high-quality, value-driven content.
Embrace these changes, adapt to the trends, and you’ll have the ability to stay ahead in the game.
Conclusion
Monitoring your organic rankings helps you identify prevailing trends and patterns within your niche and offers valuable feedback on your SEO efforts. It helps to understand what's working and what isn't. Using this knowledge, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy, maximizing relevance and effectiveness.
Therefore, once you launch your SEO campaign, you should monitor its impact on your organic rankings. If you're not seeing the desired outcome, you can tweak your strategies and reassess.
When deciding what to monitor, focus on essential keywords, landing pages, and target audience. You can use various Google tools or free/premiumSEO tools to identify key elements worth monitoring.
Regardless of the tools you choose, it's crucial to remember that these are just aids. The real power lies in how effectively you use these tools to gain insights about how to monitor organic rank and improve your SEO efforts.
Next, implement a tracking system that gives comprehensive, easy-to-understand reports and finally, regularly conduct analysis to track progress and identify any fluctuations or emerging trends.
Soak up the knowledge, amplify your skills, remain resilient, and keep optimizing. Your road to the high ranks in Google's SERPs is well within reach!
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