7 Ways To Master Keyword Ranking

Keyword ranking is the bread and butter of SEO. There is no point in having good SEO tech, great SEO content or valuable coverage without knowing if it’s making a difference. But for so many people mastering the art of keyword ranking is quite the headache. Endless spreadsheets of words and phrases, up and down, won or lost. But what does it all mean? And where do you start? Here we unpick how to get started. 

What is keyword ranking?

Keyword ranking is the process of tracking how your website performs on search engines for target keywords. Each page on Google contains up to 10 positions. Page 1 contains positions 1-10, page 2 contains 11-20 and so on… The smaller the number, the better you’re doing. Your ranking gives you an indication of your website’s visibility, who your competitors are and helps you to identify ways to improve to increase traffic to your website. 

Tracking keywords

1) Firstly, how do you track keywords? There are many tools on the market or you can contract an agency to do it for you. Personally, I prefer to use a tool and monitor keywords myself. A key part of SEO is getting your head in the data and interrogating performance – and you can’t do this so well if an agency sends you a spreadsheet every month. It’s also not expensive to do it yourself and you could save a fortune on agency fees.

My favourite tool at the moment is SEMrush. It’s easy to use, covers both research and reporting (among other things), and they have fair rates which scale for the size of your organisation. It works in most countries too (although I would always shop around first). You can also use Google Search Console to monitor performance, but I’d only ever recommend this as a secondary source of data. It will only show performance for keywords that drove traffic to your site, which isn’t useful when you’re starting out in a new subject area. Plus, it’s horribly unreliable and difficult to use (thanks Google). Find your own tool and use your agency for the technical stuff. 

2) Secondly, you don’t need to track everything. Even if you manage a small website you’re going to have a lot of topics that are relevant to you and it’s not humanly possible to stay on top of them all. For large websites it can become a mammoth task. Depending on how your organisation is set up, we recommend a maximum of 300-500 keywords per region/country or pillar. This gives you breadth of subject without taking up too much time. It can also vary depending on the size of your team. If you’re a one man band you need to keep it simple.

3) Next, size (or volume) matters! Again it will depend on the size of your organisation, but for most part you shouldn’t track/target keywords with less than 500 average monthly searches. Keywords of that volume mean that the demand is not there for that term, so don’t waste your efforts. But equally be wary of target keywords with 100,000 searches a month. They could be too competitive and you might struggle to compete with big players. You also want to make sure you have a good mix of long and short tail keywords (long tail = specific keywords of small volume, short tail = general keywords of large volume). This will mean you can realistically pitch your content, as well as going for some low hanging fruit.

4) Intent is also key when selecting keywords to track. A term may mean one thing to your business but how is it viewed externally? For instance, your organisation may be an expert on furniture by Thomas Chippendale, but a quick Google search reveals a different sort of chap who is less into cabinet-making, or even Disney’s chipmunk brothers. Yes this is niche (although a true story) but always sense check the intent of a keyword by doing a quick Google search first. This is also important because it shows you the type of website Google is expecting to serve here. If the SERP (search engine result page) is dominated by historical journals you know you’re in good company, but if you see lots of YouTube videos about dancing you might want to rethink your chances. 

5) Next, don’t track branded keywords. It’s cheating. You’d have to be doing something fairly major to not rank for your brand. This includes product names too. What you want to know is whether you’re known in your market. Use other tools for brand tracking and brand awareness. 

6) You should also look to organise your keywords by topic/tags. SEMrush allows you to assign multiple tags to each keyword which means you can quickly check in on your performance of a subject area as a whole, such as furniture. You can do this manually too via a spreadsheet and pivot your data. 

7) And lastly, don’t check your keyword rankings every day. Keywords fluctuate a lot, especially at the beginning. The data only really starts to mean something over a period of time. We recommend checking in monthly on your performance. What dropped, what improved and why? Was it you or did a competitor come along? And don’t panic, there will be winners and losers. You’re only as good as your competitors are not. The important thing is you act on it quickly. I finish every SEO meeting or training session with these upsetting but true words: SEO is never finished. Keep at it and you’ll do well. 

It might feel like a lot of work to begin with but once you’re up and running it’s easy to check in and see how you’re doing. If you spend time getting your set up right you’ll also put yourself one step ahead. Good luck!