You have completed your keyword analysis and have compiled a list of profitable keywords. It’s time to start checking the positions on your site. Sounds pretty simple, right? Yes, checking the positions themselves is a simple task. But you need to be sure that you are tracking exactly what you need. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Rank Tracker by following the steps below.
Step 1: Choosing Search Engines
First, you need to choose search engines for your SEO campaign. First, think about the target audience: what kind of visitors do you want to attract? If you are interested in international visitors, then these are definitely Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com. If it’s a specific country or region, you need to find out which search engines are used there and add them to the Rank Tracker.
Steps: Set up the desired search engines. Launch Rank Tracker and open the project. Go to menu Settings -> Priority Search Engines. Select the ones you need from the list.
Step 2: Adding a Location
When checking positions for a specific region or for several locations at once, you need to set up an advanced search in Rank Tracker.
Steps: Set the search area in the search engine settings. Go to menu Settings -> Priority search engines. Click on the “+” next to the search engine you want to add. An advanced settings window will open where you can edit your language and location settings. Enter a location in the Search area field (here you can add a country, city, or even a street). Click Apply. This location will be found on the map. Then click OK to save the created search engine.
Repeat if you need to add search engines for other locations.
After that, add columns for the created search engines to the Rank Tracker workspace. To do this, right-click on the heading of any column, find the search engines in the list, and tick them.
Step 3: Defining landing pages
Simply put, a landing page, or landing page, is the page that visitors to your site need to land on. This is the one you want to see high in the search results for a particular word. No one optimizes the same page for all keywords. So carefully analyze the list and decide which page is best for each word or phrase. The content of this page should be useful and attractive. It must match the given word so that a person types the word in the search and finds exactly what he was looking for on the landing page. It should stay on your site and not return to search results.
There are cases when one page is optimized for a keyword, but for some reason, another page of this site appears in the search results. Therefore, an important part of position monitoring is to check the ranking pages. You are very lucky because Rank Tracker will do it for you.
Steps: Pin your keywords to your landing pages. Select keywords for page optimization. Right-click on them and select Pin-selected words on a landing page.
If another page on your site ranks for that keyword, you’ll see an exclamation mark next to the found page.
Advice: See if any of your pages are already ranking for your keywords. Check positions in Rank Tracker. If one of your site’s pages is already ranking for a particular word, optimize it for that word. This is smarter than throwing all your efforts into optimizing a brand-new page.
Step 4: Monitoring SERPs
If you want to track your site’s position in different types of Google search results (answer block, images, local listing, etc.) as well as check organics, you can set it all up in Rank Tracker.
Steps: Enable saving search results history. Go to the menu Settings -> Position check mode. Make sure the Check only organics option is off and Check all positions for a keyword is on. With these settings, every time you check positions, you will be able to track not only organics but also SERP features.
Whenever your site is found in any of the special elements when checking positions, you will see an icon next to the result. Three dots in the position column mean that your site has been found in search results more than once. Click on it to see all results.
To add a SERP Features column, right-click on any column heading and select the appropriate column from the list. In this column, you will see all the special elements found on the page. Those in which your site was found are highlighted in green.
The search results history is stored in the Results Analysis tab. You can go to it at the bottom of the workspace. After each check, the results are saved in a table. In the drop-down list on the left, you can select the search engine for which you want to view the search history.
Right under the heading with the date of the review, you will find icons of special elements that are present in the search results, but which have not been assigned a position. And if the issue item is found at a certain position, there will be an icon next to the URL.
Step 5: Adding Competitor Sites
With Rank Tracker you can check the positions of not only your site but also track the positions of your competitors.
Steps: Specify the URLs of competitors’ websites. Go to Settings -> Competitors. Click the icon 
to add a competitor. Fill in the required fields.
You can enable or disable the display of competitor data. To do this, use the Show Competitors button.
Step 6: Configuring Settings
Need to check the top 100 results for a search term? Or the top 50? Or maybe only the top 10? Do you want to see all pages found for each word if your site appears in the search results more than once? Or are you only interested in the highest position? Rank Tracker can do everything. The main thing is to set the correct settings.
Steps: Set up the position check mode. Go to the Settings menu – > Position check mode. Specify what you want to check: only organics or all results. Set the number of results to check.
Advice: Adjust your SafeSearch settings. You may already know that search engines respond quickly to automated queries. They require CAPTCHAs and sometimes even block IP addresses to protect their servers from being overloaded with automated requests.
The paid version of Rank Tracker is equipped with a special anti-blocking system. It allows you to check positions through the internal servers of the program. Thus, your IP will be protected from blocking by the search engine during verification. But this option is available only for paid versions of the program (Professional, Enterprise). Therefore, if you use the free version of the program or check positions through a proxy, then you can use additional security settings (menu Settings > Search Security ), which will allow you not to violate the rules of search engines and protect your address from blocking.
If you regularly update positions in a project that contains up to 100 keywords, we recommend the following combination of settings:
- In Settings > Application Settings: Miscellaneous, reduce the number of parallel tasks to 3 or 4.
- In Settings > Search Security > Human Emulation, enable the first two options.
- In Settings > Search Security > CAPTCHA Settings, check the box next to Show CAPTCHA when checking positions in Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc.
For large projects and more frequent checks of positions, we recommend using the anti-captcha key. Add it to Settings > Search Security > CAPTCHA Settings. You can also use reliable personal proxies. To add a proxy, go to Settings > Search Security > Proxy Striping.
Step 7: Check positions
The preparation is over, and you can start the main task: checking the position of the site in search engines.
Steps: Check them out! Click on the button. After you check positions more than once, you can track changes in the Difference column.
There is also a chart that visually displays any changes in positions. We hope that it will only grow with time!
Advice: Select a date to compare results. Click. Select the date you want to compare current positions against.
Add scheduled tasks to check positions. Rank Tracker has the ability to automate position checking. This means that you won’t have to run the check manually every time. To add a scheduled task, go to Settings > Scheduler and click on.
Complete all the necessary steps: choosing the type of task, and project, setting the time, and regularity of the task.
Now you are a position-checking pro!
Congratulations! You have selected the best keywords for your SEO campaign and checked the position of your site in search engines. Now watch for all position changes. Update them regularly and analyze the results.