How to check your SEO ranking

If you’ve been working on SEO for a while, you’re probably curious to know if it’s working and might be wondering how to check your SEO ranking. So, that’s exactly what I’m going to walk you through in this post.

What are your SEO Rankings?

Well, if you're trying to determine whether your SEO efforts are paying off yet, there are a few metrics that you’ll want to track.

SEO Keyword Rankings

First, you’ll want to track your SEO keyword rankings. To do this, you’ll need to use a keyword ranking tool. Different options are available, and you can choose whether to pay for one or use a free option. There are benefits to paid keyword ranking tools. When you pay for an account, you can store your data in the account and run reports to see how your rankings are changing over time. Most of my students sign up for an account with a tool for keyword research and ranking reporting. I use paid tools for all of my clients' accounts, too.

As your SEO has time to work, your keyword rankings should increase (meaning your number gets smaller as you move closer to position #1). When you optimize a website page or blog post for a keyword and follow SEO best practices for keyword selection, Title Tag, meta description writing, image names, and SEO copywriting, you have a good chance of moving up in the keyword rankings.

How often should I check my SEO keyword rankings?

You want to check your rankings before you make any changes to your website page or blog post. This will be considered your baseline ranking or starting point. It’s important to know where you started so you know if you’re making progress or not.

After your baseline reports, you should look at your keyword ranking report at most every other week. Monthly is ideal because keyword rankings fluctuate, and you don’t want to overreact. Check your keyword ranking once a month.

What other SEO rankings should I check?

Another metric SEOs generally report on is a website’s Domain Authority (DA). Every website has a DA between 1 and 100; 1 is low, and 100 is high. Your website’s DA indicates how authoritative it’s thought to be, and the higher the DA, the more likely a website is to rank well in Google’s search results. As your website’s DA increases, you’ll likely find it’s easier to rank for more keywords.

Check your website’s Domain Authority once a month when checking your official keyword rankings. You can use a free SEO plug-in called Mozbar to check the DA of your website and any other one you want to check.

SEO Traffic Reporting

When looking at SEO ranking reports or SEO reports, you probably want to know if the increase in rankings also generates more traffic to your website. You’ll want to use Google Analytics to determine if your SEO traffic is increasing. In GA, you’ll want to look at the traffic sources report and look for the line that says “organic” because that’s your SEO traffic. If you want to find out if that number is higher than last month or year, you can compare it against a specific period in the calendar drop-down within Google Analytics or track the data in an Excel spreadsheet.

SEO Ranking Report Recap

When you’re checking your SEO rankings, remember the following: Record and review your information once a month. Check your keyword rankings, Domain Authority, and organic traffic to see if you’re getting traffic from SEO yet.

If you’ve been trying to do SEO on your own and your reports aren’t showing you that it’s working, you may have made a mistake, and that’s why it’s not working yet. I’ve got a few resources that may help you determine where you’ve made mistakes.

SEO Content Quick Start Guide – this will walk you through what to do for SEO step-by-step

Free SEO Class: Learn how to get started with SEO Content to increase free traffic to your website.

SimpleSEO Content – join me in my paid SEO Content course and learn exactly what to do for SEO and content in a step-by-step manner.