How to check your website 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 website's SEO rankings to know if what you're doing is working or if you need to adjust your SEO strategy. There are a few different metrics you'll want to check to know how your SEO program is working. 

What SEO rankings should you check for your website? 

Well, if you're trying to determine whether your SEO efforts are paying off yet, you’ll want to track a few metrics. You want to track three areas of SEO to see what's working and what might need adjusting a bit. 

You'll look at your website's Domain Authority, keyword rankings, and organic traffic to fully understand the health of your search engine optimization program. By tracking all three metrics, you'll have a better understanding of the results you're getting for the effort you're putting into your website's SEO. 

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.

Tracking your SEO keyword rankings (and seeing which page(s) are ranking for that keyword) is important because it will help you understand if Google sees your website as a good resource for that search keyword or not. You want to watch to see which page or pages are ranking the highest for the keyword so you can make sure you have a good user experience. Sometimes, Google will rank the page we've optimized for a keyword and other times, they'll choose a different page for that keyword, and you have to adjust your optimization on your website. 

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. Always add your keyword to your rank tracking program the day you do your optimization or write your new page or post so that you can see where you ranked before doing any SEO work on the page compared to where you ranked after doing your work. 

After your baseline reports, you should look at your keyword ranking report 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 so you don't drive yourself batty in the process. Don't adjust your strategy the first time you see a keyword rank drop. Many factors could be at play, causing your keyword ranking to drop. Give it a few weeks or a month to see if things settle down and go back to where they were before you make any changes. 

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.

As your website's DA goes up, we often see an increase in the number of SEO keywords ranking at the top of Google's Search Results and the amount of organic website traffic you get each month. It's not a guarantee, but we do see it happen often. 

Organic traffic reports

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 determine 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.

You should start to see an increase in organic traffic to the pages that have more keywords ranking higher (smaller numbers) in Google's search results. As you have more keywords ranking high in the search results, you'll begin to see a larger increase in organic traffic each month. 

SEO ranking reports

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. Tracking this performance will help you determine if SEO is working for your website. 

If you want to learn more about SEO reporting and keyword ranking, I teach a module on this in Simple SEO Content and will walk you through exactly what to track and how to interpret the data. You can get started today. 

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 have a few resources that may help you determine where you’ve made mistakes.