Every website owner dreams of seeing their website on the first page of the Google listing. Rain of laser-targeted traffic, endless streams of visitors, skyrocketing sales – that’s what placing a website at the top of Google’s pedestal brings. But getting to the forefront of search results is a difficult task to complete. You should always be one step ahead of your online competitors, know what’s going on in your rival’s field, where your online rivals’ websites rank for the same keywords, etc. Only then will you be able to beat the immense competition online.
Once you’ve chosen your keywords and put a lot of effort into optimizing your website for them, it’s vitally important that you look at these keyword rankings. Tracking your website’s ranking fluctuations is crucial for several reasons:
1. It gives you a clear pattern of the competitive landscape in a particular keyword niche and allows you to assess how far you are from Google’s coveted top placement.
2. Rankings check allows you to stay ahead of the game and track search engine tweaks and updates before they negatively influence your websites traffic. If your website ranking drops for any keyword, you will be able to react quickly and take appropriate action to adjust your website. This way you will avoid a long-term negative effect on your traffic and sales.
3. Knowing where you and your competitors’ websites rank in search results can help you maximize the effectiveness of your SEO campaign and minimize your SEO efforts through more rational use of your SEO resources.
There are two ways to check your website’s positions for specific keywords: manually or by bringing SEO tools into play to check rankings.
The first way is very simple and does not cost a penny. All you have to do is go to Google, enter your keyword and find your website in the search results. Sounds easy, right? But what if your website just launched and isn’t in the top 100 yet? Imagine how many pages you will have to look through blind eyes in front of the monitor before coming across your site. Also, the results you get may be largely inaccurate. The point is that Google offers personalized search, so it doesn’t matter if you’re logged into your Gmail account or not, your search results will be affected by your previous search history. This is why you may get quite different results from what most other users see.
SEO tools for ranking check offer a more effective and accurate way to track your website’s positions. A good rank checker allows you to drastically reduce your SEO workload and quickly get accurate ranking data. There are many free and paid rank checkers. And here are the most popular:
SEO Book Rank Checker (Free) is a Firefox extension that allows users to easily monitor website rankings for specific keywords in Google (US and International versions), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search. But sometimes the results that this free rank checker provides can be quite inaccurate. The point is that Rank Checker groups 100 results per page to minimize scraping on Google. This type of grouping can cause a change in ranking when compared to only seeing 10 results per SERP.
Market Samurai (paid) is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market that also allows you to check website rankings in the Big Three: Bing, Yahoo! and Google. This application allows users to compare results with previous checks and draws progress graphs illustrating the progress of website rankings. But sometimes, for an unknown reason, this SEO tool does not provide users with correct ranking data and shows results that are quite different from what most users get on Google.
Link-Assistant.Com Rank Tracker (Free & Paid) allows users to monitor website positions for an unlimited number of keywords on over 700 search engines. Equipped with the “Competitor Tracking” feature, this ranking checker allows users to compare their website rankings with those of their top competitors so that users can compare their search engine presence and the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns. Furthermore, this SEO tool only provides laser-precise ranking results and nicely organizes ranking data into highly customizable ranking reports.