4 Things You Need to Understand About Your SEO Rankings

As you start establishing an authority website online, and start creating a sound base of content on your website, you are going to naturally start to start to see rankings. That is great. But one thing that can be difficult to interpret, and oftentimes frustrating with your rankings, is discovering where you are positioned in search engines and why some articles rank, whereas others don't?

This is why I want to spend a few moments discussing the importance of UNDERSTANDING where you rank in Google, Bing and Yahoo....and ultimately how to make SEO decisions based on this comprehension.

First though, where/how do you go about "knowing" where you rank in the main search engines, and how can you effectively track this.

Finding Out Where You Rank in Search

You choose a keyword. You write an article targeting this keyword. You publish it to your website. Then wait. Then maybe wait some more.

Then what?

Well naturally, we hope our website gets indexed. There are many things that you can do to help it get indexed, but naturally as you build out your website and as you add things like a "SiteMap" to your website, you are going to get "found" by search engines and this will happen faster and faster.

But it is one thing to be "found" and it is another thing to be "ranked". How do you determine if your website is being ranked, and where specifically your website is showing up in the search results.

For this, I use the Jaaxy research platform (which is available to you here) to find and track rankings. This is available within both the Premium and Premium Plus+ memberships, and you can utilize it to check where you are ranked with keywords, and also track those keywords over time.

So how do you do this?

First, you want to see if you are ranking under your target keyword. If you JUST published your content to your website, it may not be indexed just yet. So you will want to set-up tracking for that keyword. As a Jaaxy Enterprise member (included within Premium Plus+), you will be able to track 300 keywords at a time.

Let's look at a quick example here. The first thing you want to do is click the Research tab here within WA, and this will take you into Jaaxy.

When you arrive within the Jaaxy platform, click on the SiteRank tab as shown below.

Say my article is titled, "How to Check Your Website Ranking in Google, It's Simple", and my target keyword was "how to check your website ranking in google its simple", I could input this into Jaaxy SiteRank as follows.

So I have created an article, what sort of keywords should I track.

• Your target keyword. Your target keyword is going to be the primary focus of your SiteRank activiities.
• The entire headline. This will help you determine if you are getting indexed, and how efficiently.
• Any other keyword variation. You can tackle any other related keywords, perhaps variations of your target keyword to see if you are ranking under those as well.

Once you have set-up the keywords that you want to track, you can then decide on whether you want to automate the tracking component so you can track your keywords over time.
I tend to track keywords more regualrly if they are my target keyword (daily, or twice per week), and the "would be nice to rank under" keyword I will set to longer limits. As a Premium member you get Jaaxy Lite, which includes 100 scans per month (each search requires 3, because of the search engines) and as Premium Plus+ you will have access to 10,000 monthly scans.

It is very important that you have a grasp of where you are ranking, and the fluctuations (up and down) as to where you are rankings are moving through time.
That leads me to...

4 Things You Need to Understand About SEO.

If you don’t have a pulse on your rankings, and what I like to call your current “state of authority”, then you are not going to know what type of content, and what activities you are doing in relation to SEO are translating into positive movements in your rankings, or in some cases, negative rankings.

There are some key things that you need to understand about rankings analysis, and data points you should be considering.

1. Rankings WILL fluctuate. You never want to make knee jerk reactions when you see your rankings go up or down. One thing that a seasoned SEO expert knows, that a newcomer does not is that your rankings will move around and it is completely natural. Because one ranking goes down and you lose page position, doesn't necessarily mean your content is lesser, and/or that your content is inferior than content ranked above it. It is just part of the natural movement that's taking place within search.
   
2. Google Core Updates aren’t forever. Google is constantly updating their search algorithms, and oftentimes will run an update then “fix it” afterwards. I have seen way too many times that someone is adversely hit with a Google, and make radical changes trying to assume the reason for their demise.
   
3. If Your Rankings Are Going Down, DO NOT STOP! This is the quickest path to SEO failure. If you get deflated by sinking search ranks and your solution is to “stop producing” then you are going to be setting yourself up for imminent failure.
   
4. Search Patterns are Established Over Time. You want to make decisions when you start seeing patterns in your search results. Obviously if you are creating quality content, then that is most of the battle when it comes to SEO. But things like the type of content (reviews, how to’s, information, opinionated), the competition of a keyword, the length of a keyword, content clues (comments, length of content, images/no images), speed improvements, etc.

I see far too often that people take the "wrong" actions, when they see fluctuations in their rankings. Often times it is easy to read into a problem that may not even exist without adequate data or understanding.
Also, getting frustrated and giving up on your content and rankings is the worse thing you can do...so just be careful you do not fall into that trap. I have seen it far too many times over the years, even with some of the more experienced SEO folks out there.

Understand Your Rankings and Improve Them Faster.

If you understand where you are getting ranked, what type of content is ranking higher, and trends on your website as a whole gaining or losing authority/popularity in search engines, it will be a much more predictable way to improve rankings.

When you understand what activities are leading to results, and which ones aren't...what type of content is ranking, what type isn't, at that point you can become much more resourceful with your decision making.

I have always been a proponent of spending maximum time on activities that produce maximal results, and this applies to the SEO world as well.

I hope this has offered you some perspective and insight on not just the importance of tracking ranks, but how to appropriately make changes to improve upon them. If you have any questions about tracking, understanding, or analyzing your rankings leave them below and I wil help you out.

PS. I recently ran a "How to Assess & Amplify Your Rankings" Premium Plus+ class on this topic, I highly recommend that you check it out if you are P+.