What is Keyword Monitoring and how to Track Keywords

Understanding how users find your website is key for a successful SEO strategy. Once you identify the most important keywords to your business, you should track and monitor these keywords so you can react quickly in case of a drop in ranking. It’s also crucial to monitor changes in ranking – so that you can measure the success of your optimization measures, and quantify success to your stakeholders:

• Monitor important keywords both individually or as a segment to easily manage thousands of keywords.

• Track your keyword ranking developments to see how your keyword sets progress over time.

• Set keyword ranking goals – for example, aim for 75% of keywords within any keyword segment to be ranking on page 1. Use these goals to help you stay on track and quantify success to stakeholders.

Contents

• Introduction to keyword monitoring

• Adding keywords to keyword monitoring

• Setting up keyword segments

• Keyword rank monitoring

• Setting up ranking goals

• Setting up keyword alerts

Introduction to keyword monitoring

Keyword monitoring is an integral part of a keyword strategy. You should be aware which keywords bring the most traffic to your website (this is easy to find out in Ryte under Search Engine Optimization by simply clicking on the “Keyword monitoring” report). Once you’ve identified the important keywords for your brand, you can ensure these keywords keep their position or aim to improve their rankings. That’s where keyword monitoring comes in: monitoring the keywords that help users find your brand and create content around these keywords, helping to bring more traffic to your website.

How many clicks and impressions do your keywords receive? What’s their CTR and position? How has their visibility changed over time? Monitoring the progress of your keywords over time can help you make decisions regarding your website content. if an important keyword drops in position, CTR, clicks, or impressions, you need to take action. For example, you can improve the CTR of keywords by optimizing their meta titles and descriptions.

Adding keywords to keyword monitoring

You can easily monitor your keywords with Ryte’s “Keyword Monitoring” report under Search Engine Optimization. You can add keywords the following ways:

• Add keywords from the Keywords report: Go to Search Engine Optimization >> Keywords, and you can choose any of these to add to keyword monitoring by clicking on the plus sign next to the keyword.

Figure 1: Add keywords to "Keyword Monitoring" from the "Keywords" Report

• Add keywords manually: in the top right-hand corner of the “Keyword Monitoring” overview, simply type in the keyword you want to add to monitoring.

• Upload a csv file – if you have a large number of keywords you want to add to keyword monitoring, you can simply upload a csv file.

Figure 2: Add keywords to "Keyword Monitoring" manually, or via CSV upload

Set up keyword segments

Over time, your list of monitored keywords can grow considerably. You might find yourself monitoring thousands of keywords! With such a high number of keywords, it can be more efficient to analyze these keywords in clusters, for example, keywords relevant for a particular region, market, section of website, search intent or simply keywords you’ve optimized in a recent campaign.

With Ryte, you can monitor these keyword clusters. You can add your monitored keywords to a segment so that you can track the progress of a certain keyword group, and perform more precise and comprehensive keyword analyses.

• Easily manage large groups of keywords and track their rankings on a weekly and yearly basis

• Get a clear visualisation of changes, and report progress easily to stakeholders and clients by simply exporting your data visualisation.

• Save time – once you’ve set up a keyword segment, you can use this segment as a filter in all SES reports.

How to set up keyword monitoring segments

Choose monitored keywords directly from the table by checking the box to the left of the keyword. Once you’ve checked the box click on “Settings” in the top right hand corner, and click “Add to segment”. Here you can add the keyword to an existing segment, or simply create a new segment.

Figure 3: Add monitored keywords to a segment

The segment will then appear above the data visualisation, and you can click on this to get an overview of the performance of the keywords in this specific segment.

Figure 4: Data visualization for your segment

This new segment will also then automatically appear in the segments overview, so you can more easily control and manage your keywords, enabling you to perform better keyword analysis and to track the progress of keyword clusters.

Monitoring keyword rankings with the “Ranking Development” Report

Rankings are widely seen as the most stable search KPIs as they are independent of seasonal fluctuations which can lead to a spike or drop in clicks, impressions and CTR.

Rankings are therefore an ideal KPI for reporting the success of SEO measures. To get the deserved credit for your SEO efforts, you need to demonstrate how the rankings of important keywords have improved. If you monitor thousands of keywords, it can be hard to come by a clear overview of ranking changes for keyword clusters – that’s where Ryte can help!

In the “Ranking Development” Report, you see the ranking changes of your monitored keywords. You can specify the time period in the top right corner of the report and choose whether to display the ranking developments in the table below on a weekly or monthly basis. The graph shows the time series of how many keywords are ranking on pages 1, 2 or 3+.

Figure 5: "Ranking Development" Report

Set up ranking goals to easily track progress

The effects of SEO measures are often only visible months after the measures have been implemented. That’s why it’s important to set clear goals and continuously monitor whether you are achieving these goals. Setting goals helps you allocate your time and resources effectively, helps keep your motivation levels high, and helps quantify the success of SEO measures – both for yourself and for presenting to stakeholders.

We want to make it easy for you to easily monitor whether you are achieving your goals, and to quickly report on your achievements so that you can spend your time optimizing rather than reporting. With the goals feature, you will be able to easily measure and report on your progress. The goal, as well as your current progress, are visualised in the report.

Define your goal: For agencies, you can derive goals based on agreements with your clients, and what your clients want to achieve. In-house SEOs could derive goals from your department OKRs. An example could be what is the percentage of keywords that should rank on page 1 on Google for a given segment – e.g. that 75% of the keywords in the segment “E2E Testing” should rank on page 1.

Set up your goal: To set up a ranking goal, you first need to set up a keyword segment. Then, in the Ranking Development report, click on the segment, and you will have the option for setting up a goal.

Figure 6: Add a ranking goal

Figure 7: Set up the goal - in this case 85% of keywords on page 1

Check your performance with one glance: The goal achievement indicator gives you immediate feedback on how close you are to reaching your goal.

Figure 8: See if you've reached your goal

Keep on track of your keywords with keyword alerts

Keyword Alerts are email notifications to inform you when an important keyword drops in a metric of your choosing – clicks, impressions, CTR or position. Setting up alerts gives you the option of receiving an email when a keyword metric of your choosing increases or decreases by an amount.

To set up a keyword alert, firstly navigate to Keyword Monitoring. Once you have added a keyword to keyword monitoring, you will see a column for “Alerts” with a notification sign next to each keyword.

Figure 9: Keyword Alerts in "Keyword Monitoring"

Click on the bell to be given options of adding alerts. You can add alerts for clicks, impressions, CTR and rankings. For example, here, I want to receive an email when the clicks for the keyword “xy” drop by 10%. If you choose the option “high sensitivity”, you will be alerted as soon as the value exceeds the threshold you have specified. If you choose “low sensitivity” you will be alerted when the weekly average exceeds the threshold you have specified.

Figure 10: Set up a keyword alert

The alert is then triggered as soon as the clicks for this keyword drop by 10%. Then, I receive an email showing the condition (what did I want to be notified about), what this was triggered by, and the current value. Everyone who has access to the project will receive the email, unless you opt out of emails in the project settings. You can set 5 alerts per keyword.

Figure 11: Keyword alert email

Using the keyword alerts function will make it even easier for you to monitor your most important keywords. It’s also a great way of keeping track of the keywords you have most recently optimized, and you can easily forward the email to colleagues with a list of instructions to make working in a team even easier.

Conclusion

To sum up, Ryte’s “Keyword Monitoring”, you can track your keyword rankings over a long period of time, removing the necessity for other rank tracking tools. It helps you create the exact reports that you need – including options to choose the segment, time period and reporting frequency. Graphics and visualisations allow you to quickly grasp any changes and create an appealing, exportable dashboard to present to others.