Keywords have been the key foundation of SEO since the beginning of search engines. Over time, implementing and ranking for the right keywords has become more and more important for any business, especially those looking to drive organic traffic to their website and increase their income. This has necessitated the use of keyword monitoring tools.
However, it takes a formidable keyword strategy and a consistent content development effort to feature on the result pages. That’s the more reason you need a keyword monitor to track the performance of your keywords.
By using keyword monitoring tools, you can track how specific keywords perform and make data-driven decisions. That will make your site more visible to search engines and improve your organic traffic.
Key Takeaways
- Keyword monitoring is the process of tracking the ranking position of websites and landing pages for certain keywords.
- There are several types of keyword monitoring techniques based on your final intent.
- Ranking, popularity and competitiveness are some of the metrics you should measure when monitoring for keywords.
- If your goal is to maximize your organic reach, you should definitely look into keyword-monitoring tools.
- Using keyword monitoring tools helps you track increases and decreases in ranking, track competitor keywords and find new and relevant keywords.
What Is Keyword Monitoring?
Keyword monitoring is any activity that tracks the position of your site based on some particular keywords. It is the process of tracking the ranking position of websites and landing pages for certain keywords. This lets you extract relevant data points and KPIs about your SEO strategy and search engine competition on each keyword.
Typically, you want to rank on the first page for every keyword search. Nonetheless, you need to monitor those keywords regularly to detect conversions and also undertake necessary steps as far as your site ranking is concerned.
A keyword tracking/monitoring tool will also show you various metrics, including:
- a keyword’s monthly search volume
- the number of clicks each URL ranking for the keyword is receiving
- the ranking your website holds for a particular keyword
- the click-through-rate for your page that is optimized for the keyword compared to its number of impressions
- how your ranking for a keyword has changed over time.
Monitoring your keyword ranking shows how well your site is performing on search engines and social media platforms. Doing this regularly is a valid indicator of your site position changes over a specific period.
Types of Keyword Monitoring
There are several types of keyword monitoring techniques based on your final intent. Some of the most popular use cases of keyword monitoring are:
1. Trend analysis
Keep in check what’s popular right now and use those keywords to get more traffic. For example, if you notice that many people are searching for “sustainable fashion”, you might decide to use that keyword to attract people interested in that topic.
2. Content optimization
Have a site but are clueless about spiking your organic traffic? Figure out what keywords your ideal target audience is searching for. For example, if you have a blog about cooking and notice that many people are searching for “easy dinner recipes”, you might use that keyword in your blog post titles and throughout your content to attract more readers.
3. Competitor analysis
Want to know what your competitors are doing? Try to figure out what keywords they’re using. For example, if you have a clothing store and you notice that your biggest competitor is using the keyword “affordable fashion”, decide to use that keyword too to try and attract some of their customers.
4. Brand monitoring
Keep track of what people say about your brand online, and try using those keywords to improve your image. For example, if you notice that many people are complaining about your customer service, you might use keywords like “great customer service” to show that you’re improving in that area.
5. PPC advertising
If you use paid advertising to promote your website or product, keyword monitoring will save you bucks. It can help you figure out which keywords to target in your ads to get the most clicks and conversions.
6. SEO optimization
Do you regularly optimize your website to rank higher in search engine results pages? Keyword monitoring will reveal which keywords to target in your content to improve your rankings. You can also optimize your website for local SEO by incorporating relevant local keywords into your content.
7. Social media marketing
Get more out of your social media presence to promote your brand. Keyword monitoring can connect the dots to what people are saying about your brand on social media, so you can respond accordingly.
8. Product development
Keyword monitoring is an underrated tool to find what products or services people are interested in. For example, if you notice that a lot of people are searching for “vegan protein powder”, you might decide to develop a new product that meets that demand.
9. Market research
Keyword monitoring is another effective market research tactic that involves gathering information about your target audience. By monitoring your audience’s keywords, you can gain insights into their interests and preferences.
10. Reputation management
Lastly, eliminate all chances of risking your reputation by monitoring your brand’s online reputation and taking steps to manage it. Keyword monitoring lets you identify negative reviews or comments about your brand, which you can then address to improve your reputation.
Metrics to Measure When Monitoring Keywords
The importance of web and social keyword monitoring relies on the data that you obtain. Hence, you should measure these important metrics when you monitor keywords:
Keyword ranking
Obviously, starting with the most popular metric. Monitoring keyword ranking helps content creators to understand their real market position on specific topics.
It’s very important to check on what page your content ranks for your targeted keywords. As a matter of fact, acknowledging your place in your industry’s SEO hierarchy is the beginning of the content evaluation process.
Keyword Popularity
Keyword popularity is another important aspect of sketching your future content creation and management strategy.
Let’s say you’ve decided to create content targeting a specific keyword. How many users search for that keyword? A keyword’s search volume is very important in general since it has a direct effect on the page’s traffic.
Keyword Competitiveness
So, now you know how many users search for the keyword you want to rank for, it’s time to see how your competitors are covering the topic.
Usually, the level of competitiveness for a keyword comes from several factors such as:
- Keyword Volume
- Relevance
- User Intent
- Backlinks
- Total search results
- CPC (cost per click)
Luckily, you can monitor keyword competitiveness by using keyword research tools that offer the above metrics.
Keeping track of keyword competitiveness will help you adjust your SEO strategy. For example, you might choose to focus on long-tail keywords with lower competitiveness. Another optimization is to adjust your content strategy to create more high-quality, authoritative content. This way you can compete with the top-ranking websites in your niche.
Branded keywords
Last but not least, there’s brand keyword monitoring. Branded keywords are specific names and phrases that are instantly connected to your brand. These keywords can be:
- Brand names
- Product names and entire product line names
- Service names
- Brand misspellings and/or name variations
How to perform keyword monitoring
Top Keyword Monitoring Tools
Keyword rank monitoring tools can be an advantage to you whatever the scale of your business or your niche, but of course, your business does need to be online. If your goal is to maximize your organic reach, you should definitely look into keyword-monitoring tools.
Here are our top scalable software picks:
1. Semrush
Semrush’s Position Tracking tool allows you to track daily ranking changes across a set of custom keywords. It even integrates with Google Analytics and Google’s Looker Studio. It tracks keyword rankings across all devices and locations.
Besides showing standard ranking changes, Position Tracking shows you:
- How your competitors are performing, their landing pages, and search engine real estate
- Keyword cannibalization issues
- SERP features (e.g., featured snippet, local pack, etc.) that you could potentially rank for
You can also set custom alerts that ping you when certain rankings change.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides detailed information about website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. With this tool, you can see the search terms driving traffic to your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, and whether they are converting into customers.
It also integrates with other Google apps in your tool stack, including Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console. However, with the move to GA4, it requires some technical knowledge to set up and use effectively.
Key features include:
- Marketing analytics integrations
- Real-time data reports and dashboards
- Content grouping
3. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free online tool by Google to monitor the web for specific keywords or phrases. Just create an alert for any keyword or phrase you want to track, such as your brand name, your competitors’ names, or any other topic you’re interested in. Whenever new web content is published that matches your alert, you’ll receive an email notification with a link to that content.
Google Alerts is amazing for monitoring your brand’s online reputation, keeping track of industry news, or staying up-to-date on any other topic you’re interested in. It’s easy to set up and use, and it’s completely free. You can create as many alerts as you want and customize them to your specific needs.
Key features include:
- You can customize alerts by choosing specific keywords, sources, and frequency of alerts.
- Google Alerts is a free tool for beginners in keyword tracking.
4. Google Search Console
In Google Search Console, you can view the keywords individual web pages rank for. It also shows you the performance data for all your site’s keywords — including the total number of clicks, impressions, average position, and click-through rate. These pieces of data help you identify and optimize underperforming content to rank higher in the search results.
Key features include:
- Data highlighting
- URL inspection
- Mobile usability testing
You can also submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling and indexing, review search traffic data and resolve page loading issues.
5. SEO Powersuite
SEO Powersuite is a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. And tracks desktop, mobile, and local keyword rankings in close to 600 search engines (including Google, Bing, and Yahoo).
You can use it to:
- Discover which websites you’re competing with in the SERPs
- Learn which keywords are driving the most traffic to your competitor’s websites
- Map keywords to pages and get notified if the wrong page starts ranking for a target keyword
- Discover SERP features (like featured snippets) to target
SEO Powersuite also has a helpful historical rank-tracking feature that lets you review years of keyword data. This record helps you analyze your own ranking performance as well as your competitors’, and also to uncover trends.
6. Keyhole
Keyhole is a perfect keyword monitoring tool due to its real-time tracking and monitoring capabilities, comprehensive dashboards, and reporting. Right under social listening, you can add trackers with your brand name, product name, or any relevant keyword, and Keyhole will track it for you.
You can also get real-time alerts of who mentioned those so you can participate in conversations and engage with your audience.
The best part is it also analyzes sentiment so you get an idea of what your customer is feeling without even reading through the entire post/comment.
Another quick tip here is to track your profiles and get a brief overview of your top posts and comments on social media. Plus, you can have an eye on competitors and track their comments or keywords so you sneak into their handles and steal their leads.
Lastly, Keyhole’s QuickTrends is one of the best features that lets you compare any keyword and monitor its popularity and trend. This is a powerful tool if you wish to know where your brand stands in the market.
7. SerpWatcher
Something that stands out with this tool is the ease of use. It’s very easy to set up your account and start tracking keywords. This is perfect for freelancers and smaller agencies looking to avoid the complications of enterprise SEO tools.
SerpWatcher provides daily rank tracking, historical data, and competitor analysis. It allows you to monitor your site’s rankings and track your competitors’ performance. It also provides valuable insights into your keyword’s performance and allows you to identify new growth opportunities.
Key features include:
- Daily SERP reports for your keywords
- Competitor keyword research
- Performance Index
- Historical SERP data
8. Accuranker
Accuranker offers automated keyword tagging and organization to support users managing lots of keywords. Its dynamic rules automatically flag keywords with (or without) certain terms. The tool has 24 billion desktop and mobile keywords in its database, which works well for larger SEO agencies and enterprises. Also, you can refresh all your rankings in real-time.
Accuranker’s Organic Site Explorer dashboard shows your website’s keyword rankings over time. Also, the competitive landscape on the SERPs, and there are filtering options as well.
If you’d like to pull keyword data into your internal software, Accuranker’s application programming interface (API) speeds up the process.
One of the benefits of AccuRanker is its user-friendly interface and fast, accurate results. However, it can be expensive for small businesses, and it may not provide as many features as other SEO tools.
Key features include:
- Google Search Console integration
- Data segmentation for keyword categories
- Supports historical data importation
9. Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker lets you visualize your keyword and overall SEO performance with historical graphs. So, you quickly see changes in your share of voice, positions, traffic, and SERP features. These simple charts also come in handy for competitive analysis. You can also compare yourself to up to 10 competitors.
Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker tracks desktop and mobile rankings across 190 countries. It includes info on 15 different types of SERP features, like featured snippets, local packs, and knowledge panels.
You can also group and review keywords with custom tags. And automate keyword reporting with weekly or monthly deliveries.
10. SE Ranking
SE Ranking’s Keyword Rank Tracker offers a Content Score metric that indicates how easy or hard it will be to get your page to rank for a certain keyword. The tool also provides recommendations on how to improve your chances of ranking.
SE Ranking also has a user-friendly dashboard and drop-down menus that make it easy to:
- Identify keywords bringing in the most traffic
- Uncover competing pages
- Spot when keyword rankings drop
- Group and tag keywords
You can also add target URLs for each keyword to help avoid cannibalization.
SE Ranking also automates reporting, so you can save time and understand your keyword performance quickly.
11. Keyword.com
Keyword.com’s rank tracker allows you to track rankings for all your site’s keywords simultaneously — as the name implies. You can also compare rankings over a specific period to know how well your SEO efforts are paying off.
In addition, this tool shows you keyword trends to help you identify SERP opportunities early and boost rankings ahead of the competition. Keyword is suitable for local keyword tracking, and agency and enterprise keyword tracking.
Key features include:
- In-depth competitor SERP performance data
- Featured snippets tracking
- Search performance dashboards
- Custom-branded reporting
- International, national, regional and city location keyword tracking.
- Daily, Weekly and Monthly keyword data updates.
- Google Search Console integration
12. Advanced Web Ranking
As the name suggests, Advanced Web Ranking is good for more experienced users, like large agencies that work with a lot of clients. This keyword position tracking tool has unlimited projects across its plans. And you can compare your performance to up to 50 competitors.
This comparison includes detailed looks at ranking keywords, won SERP features, and top landing pages.
Besides tracking traditional search engine rankings, the platform also tracks rankings on websites like YouTube and Amazon. You can also set up email alerts to instantly know when certain rankings change across sites.
Advanced Web Ranking’s reporting allows you to add in data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads. You can also automate report deliveries.
13. Spyfu
SpyFu is a web-based search analytics tool that provides insights into competitors’ search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) strategies. With SpyFu, you can research competitors’ organic search rankings, their top-performing keywords, and the ad copy they use for PPC campaigns.
Compare your site’s performance with those of your competitors in terms of website traffic, keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and advertising campaigns. Know the best practices and strategies that are working in your niche. Find profitable keywords for their SEO and PPC campaigns with insights into search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), and competition level for any given keyword.
Benefits of Using Keyword Monitoring Tools
Here are three of the most important features of keyword monitoring tools:
1. Track rankings increases and decreases
Track your own rankings increases and decreases for different keywords, and help discern the reasons behind these movements. You need to know why rankings have dropped in order to make the necessary fixes. You also need to understand what’s working well so you can use proven strategies for other keywords.
2. Track competitor’s keywords
Track keywords that competitors are ranking for and see what possible opportunities were missed. Close the gaps that may be holding you back from achieving first-page results.
3. Find new, relevant keyword opportunities
Find new keyword opportunities that can help you increase your visibility. Determine which keywords are most worthwhile for your business based on relevancy, how evergreen they are, and their competitiveness. Analyze whether a keyword makes sense for your business to pursue based on search intent.
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