How to set rank tracker basics for SEO campaigns? A useful list for beginners

Today I want to write an article for the SEO beginners, on how to set rank tracker basics for their campaigns. You may not be using an SEO rank tracker yet, but you're doing some SEO work for your websites. I want to share some knowledge about the usage of rank trackers with you, to show how necessary the rank trackers are, even if you're only working on several projects. To make it easier to understand, I would assume that you're working on to achieve the top ranks on 5 keywords. The keywords are about 2 or 3 words long and the monthly search volume in search engines like Google is medium size.

Let's assume that you are a company developing tools for SEO, your main keyword will be "SEO tools" for your niche. But as we all know, the organic searches targeting long-tail keywords is very import. In this instance, your long-tail keywords will be "free SEO tools", "best SEO tools" and so on. You should not only target your main keyword, which is only 2 or 3 words long, you should pay more attention to the long-tail keywords, they will bring impressive traffic compared with the main keywords.

Rank tracker basics

Although the search volume of each long-tail keyword is not as many as the main keyword, the conversion is much higher than the main keyword. It is also easier to get ranked at the top than the main keyword, so to speak, the long-tails are the cash-converter. Of all the searches every day, about seven percent is made by people searching for long-tail keywords. Even for the easiest SEO campaign, you may need at least 3 long-tail keywords for your main keyword. So this will make a total of 20 keywords to track, if you're targeting 5 main keywords (3 long-tails per each main keyword).

Now you've reached the true matter of handling SEO manually. To get the actual ranks of all your keywords, you will first add the 20 keywords to your tracking list in rank tracker. Plus the Google's results vary on different devices, locations and different accounts, you will need to track 3 combinations for each of the 20 keywords. Now the total keywords to track reach 60. The second thing you couldn't ignore is there are other search engines. You need also track on Bing and Yahoo!. As mentioned in SEO rank tracker for better rank performances, they take up about 15% of the search share. So simply add the 20 keywords for both of them, this will make the total keywords number to 100.

Track SEO keywords

In the end we've got about 100 keyword rank combinations to track, believe it or not, this is only the most conservative estimate for a small SEO campaign. For a medium scale campaign, the keywords to track will become much more than this. Fortunately, we can turn to SEO rank trackers for help. With an SEO rank tracker, the tracking work becomes an easy job. It can track tens of thousands keywords, from different devices and locations at the same time. All you need to do is add them in your list. Then you can view their reports to get clear rank vision of your keywords. You can choose to track daily or every 2, 3 days, or weekly. All rank data will be presented in web and available from anywhere all over the world.

When you're checking ranks manually, you will be confused by different ranks from different locations and devices. Whereas the SERP tracker can bring you the most accurate ranking data. Let's have a look at what are the different rank combinations you should track, for only one single keyword rank data.

• a. Desktop rank in Google.com web. This is mainly what people will see from desktop in the US. This will give you a brief idea on how your keyword ranks.
• b. Desktop rank in Google.com web for local place. This is what people will see from only local places.
• c. Mobile rank in Google.com web. This is what people will see from only mobile devices. Please be aware that mobile results may be quite different than the desktop ranks. This rank is affected by your site's mobile-friendly score. This rank is location based.
• d. Ranks in other search engines. Yahoo!'s results are provided by Bing, so this will make your SEO much easier, you can target Bing for both of the two SEs when doing SEO jobs.

Track your ranking

Now I believe you would know it will be a tough job if you're tracking ranks manually, without an SEO rank tracker. Read this post on how to choose a best rank tracker: When choosing an SEO rank tracker, 6 factors you must consider. Hope it would be helpful for you to choose a best tracker for your SEO job.

At the end I want to introduce some other useful functions a rank track will help you. It can provide you the true rank data that you can't get if you choose to check manually. It can format ranking data and present you a detailed report so that you can see the changes. It can tell you how your competitor is doing and how you can beat it. Read this post to choose a best rank tracker and set up your first SEO campaign.