What is Keyword Monitoring?

Keyword monitoring is any activity that tracks your site’s position based on specific keywords. This method allows you to generate appropriate metrics and statistics.

If you’ve been thinking about launching a new SEO campaign or enhancing an existing one, you know how important it is to target and rank for the correct keywords in order to drive traffic to your website. 

It complements other SEO factors like choosing the best WordPress hosting, making sure your site has high-quality inbound links and content, and making sure your site’s architecture makes it simple for visitors to navigate.

Since the inception of search engines, keywords have been the main building block of SEO. It has become increasingly crucial for any organization to use the proper keywords and rank for them over time. Particularly those who want to boost their website’s organic traffic and revenue.

Brands that work hard to rank for particular keywords need to monitor how those rankings change over time for their website. They should keep an eye on any changes to their keyword ranks. If a company owner detects a decline in traffic, it can be because some of their website’s pages aren’t ranking as well as they used to for particular keywords.

Understanding what keyword monitoring is and why it should be a part of your SEO strategy is crucial if you want to see success with your own SEO initiatives.

As we proceed, we’ll:

• Consider what keyword tracking and analysis are.
• Step back and consider how to find pertinent content ideas.
• Consider the various keyword monitoring techniques.
• Learn about the advantages of keyword monitoring and some of the top tools for it.

How is keyword monitoring important and what does it contain?

Any successful SEO plan must include an understanding of how consumers find your website. Researching the terms and phrases customers use to locate your website—also referred to as keyword research—is a necessary step in coming to this understanding. Then, in order to increase traffic to your website, you must target these keywords.

The target market for an ATS supplier, for instance, is probably going to be talent acquisition teams or recruitment firms. Users in this market’s target will probably look up terms like:

• The best software for hiring
• Best ATS for recruiting
• How to pick the finest applicant tracking system
• What qualities an ATS should have.

The ATS supplier will want to confirm that their website is prominently shown for these categories of keywords. Following that, they can monitor these keywords to observe how their website performs over time.

Monitoring keywords is the term used for this surveillance. Monitoring the performance of a website’s or a set of web pages’ rankings for particular keywords over time is known as keyword monitoring. Keyword monitoring or tracking tools, such as those found in SEO platforms like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush, is often used to accomplish this.

A keyword tracking/monitoring tool will also show you various metrics, including:

• Monthly search volume for a term
• How many clicks each URL with a high keyword rating is getting
• The position that your website has for a specific keyword
• The ratio of your keyword-optimized page’s click-through rate to the number of impressions
• How your position has evolved over time for a particular term?

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Gaining knowledge of key information through media monitoring

A media monitoring tool can teach you a lot about your audience and what they like and dislike in addition to the SEO tools already discussed. You can see in real-time what your audience thinks about your material thanks to media monitoring tools that keep an eye on web sources.

Take Mediatoolkit, for instance. It monitors more than 100 million online sources (including blogs, social media, forums, etc.) and quickly delivers results that are pertinent to your feed. Let’s imagine you run an online store and want to boost your organic traffic. You may enter the names of your rivals into the program, search for news about the sector, and keep track of what people are saying about them.

By looking at what your competitors are doing, you may identify any holes in your content strategy, obtain honest feedback about what your audience likes and dislikes, and be certain that you’ll be among the first to address emerging market trends.

Your marketing efforts could significantly benefit from using this tool in conjunction with an SEO tool to identify the precise term that would yield the best results.

The advantages of Keyword Monitoring

You can determine the success of your SEO efforts by using keyword monitoring.

75% of users never stop clicking Google’s first page. You should strive to appear on the front page of search results. Tracking and monitoring the keywords you want to rank for on an ongoing basis is the simplest approach to determine whether you’re doing this over an extended period of time.

Every time you make an investment in SEO, you want to be able to see clearly how your marketing and SEO efforts are succeeding. If you invest in SEO and see an improvement in your keyword rankings, your SEO is working better. If your keyword ranks are declining, more research might be needed.

You may learn more about the terms you’re targeting by using keyword monitoring. You can keep track of the keywords that your rivals are ranking for by comparing your keyword rankings to theirs. For your own website, you can also look for new keyword prospects. The majority of SEO tools will also show you which of your competitors’ material is most effective, which you can use to guide your own content strategy.

You can use keyword monitoring to determine whether your on-page SEO could use some improvement.

You can better grasp what your target audience is looking for by using keyword monitoring. It can assist you in avoiding producing content that won’t be found by your target audience and won’t rank in search engines.

Additionally, monitoring the terms for which you are ranked highly might assist you in determining whether the traffic is sufficiently converting. Is the traffic that these keywords are bringing to your website staying there for a long time? Do people join your email list when they do this? Are they requesting a demo of your product or completing a contact form?

You can try to enhance the click-through rate by optimizing the page’s title tag and meta description if users attempt to increase the click-through rate.

Additionally, indicators like click-through rate will help you decide whether you should keep targeting low-search traffic keywords for which you now rank well. If a keyword has a low search volume but you are still getting conversions from search traffic, you should continue to focus on it.

READ: Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2023

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You can find fresh keyword prospects by using keyword monitoring.

By observing how your competitors are performing for certain keywords, keyword monitoring can help you find new options to test out.

You can enter a term into a keyword monitoring tool, for instance, if you were an SEO agency and wanted to write a piece of content for the keyword “Newsletter Software.” Then, you can check to see if any of your rivals are showing up for it and decide if you should target this keyword.

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Different forms of Keyword Monitoring

The two primary categories of keyword monitoring are:

1- Classic  keyword tracking

The most “classic” type of keyword monitoring is traditional keyword monitoring. It seeks to provide the answer to the query “What is my ranking in a search engine?” for a keyword you might relate to your company. Regular keyword monitoring is beneficial if:

• Your company only provides one kind of good or service.
• Is contained in a single location
• has low regard for its service or goods.

Businesses may experience issues when utilizing conventional keyword monitoring if:

• They provide multiple goods and services.
• Having a number of places.

This is because, despite searching for the same term, search engines have changed over time, and different users may receive different search results.

When choosing which search results are ideal to show to a user, search engines take a variety of criteria into account. These include the device they’re using to search, where they are, what language they’re using, and other factors. Make sure the technology you select can track keywords in several places if you want to analyze how your website performs for a particular keyword in various locations.

2- Section keyword tracking

For effective keyword identification, this type of keyword monitoring entails labeling and categorizing your terms.

If your website sells a variety of goods and services, you can discover that tracking performance gets more challenging as the number of target keywords grows. or if you don’t classify them at all.

Additionally, you could wish to concentrate your keyword approach on a certain collection of terms. In particular, a set that solely pertains to one of the goods or services you sell or one particular group of goods or services. Your reports can become muddled if certain keywords are not categorized.

Both of these issues can be avoided by adding a distinctive identifier to your terms. The name of a brand, a product, or a category could serve as this distinctive identification. Any tag that will allow you to distinguish between one group of keywords or one keyword from another may be used.

You should be able to tag distinct keywords and filter them using any reliable keyword monitoring tool. For instance, the email marketing provider Sendinblue, which provides a variety of email services, is a newsletter program. They may add a tag to that set of keywords if they wanted to track terms that are only associated with their newsletter software product.

Sendinblue will be able to measure the same metrics as a conventional keyword campaign, but divided into different areas depending on the service they are emphasizing. This is especially helpful if multiple teams are in charge of overseeing various items for your business.

It would be more logical to only track pages that fall under your category, for instance, if one team is in charge of the landing pages for SMS marketing and another is in charge of the pages for mailing software.

As firms expand and add new team members, splitting keyword monitoring makes it more sensible.

What resources are available for keyword monitoring

Using a tool with capabilities that can do it for you is the most effective approach to monitoring keywords. The procedure is greatly simplified by using a program that can track your chosen keywords and provide you with in-depth statistics and outcomes.

There are many different products available on the market that have keyword tracking or monitoring capability. Sadly, we are unable to cover them all in one article, but here are our top three:

1- Google Analytics 

If you’re on a tight budget, Google Analytics is an excellent free tool to utilize to track your keywords.

Effective keyword monitoring in Google Analytics requires some preparation. You must first link your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. Press “Set up Search Console data sharing” after completing this step, and then provide a Property Name, Default URL, and Default View.

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You might need to wait a few days after doing this for the data to begin filling. Navigate to “Acquisitions > Search Console > Queries” once the data has been populated. You may see the precise keywords or phrases for which you are ranking in this view. Additionally, you can keep an eye on the average position for the keywords you rank for as well as the quantity of clicks each term receives.

The average position of your website would be 8.5, for instance, if it showed up fifth for one query and seventh for another. Although cost-effective, keyword tracking in Google Analytics does have certain disadvantages.

Google My Business, Google Page Speed Insights, Google Ads Keyword Planner, and other Google technologies can be used in addition to analytics.

2- Ahrefs

Rank Tracker is a keyword monitoring tool from Ahrefs. You can keep an eye on your keyword rankings across 170 countries on desktop and mobile. The tool’s capabilities are adaptable. A list of terms you want to monitor throughout your own website can be entered or imported. To compare your chosen keywords to those of your competitors, you can optionally input their URLs.

Once you’ve configured the tool, Ahrefs will begin collecting data and provide you with updates on a regular basis. You will be alerted to any changes in your keyword rankings via these updates.

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3- SEMRush

The Rank Tracking tool of SEMRush is used to track keywords. You can enter the terms you wish to track and set up personalized notifications, just like Ahrefs. These notifications will let you know if the position of a particular term changes. According to the SEMRush website, data on keyword rankings is updated every 24 to 48 hours.

Additionally, you may connect your SEMRush account to third-party services like Google Analytics (GA). You can upload your keywords from a.txt ,.xls, or.csv file to SEMRush and begin tracking them, or you can enter keywords from your GA account.

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4- Google Search Console

This is yet another tool for keyword research. It has insider access to its data and adjusts for the variations in search results brought on by tailored search results.

Due to its accuracy, Google Search Console is widely used. It is the only tool that offers precise ranks and accurate click data. Other tools merely display aggregate ranks and traffic projections.

You may see information about the CTR and average positions, as well as which keywords are driving traffic to your site, in the performance report. Additionally, you can examine how well your website performed during a specific period of time.

Additionally, Google Search Console provides sufficient information on which mobile platforms and nations are driving the most clicks, impressions, and CTR for particular search queries.

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Conclusion 

Keyword monitoring is one of the finest ways to gauge the effectiveness of any SEO campaign you conduct over time. You may consistently gain insight into how well your website or a particular web page ranks for a given term by keeping track of your keywords.

This data can help you improve your SEO campaigns, guide your keyword research, and outrank your rivals for the keywords you’re after.