How to Measure Overall Rank Performance | Rank Ranger

Question: “What’s the easiest way for us to measure keyword rank performance over
the course of our online marketing and SEO efforts for the sites that we
manage?”   

Answer: Simple, use Rank Ranger’s Overall Ranking Performance report!

Measuring Overall Rank Performance

On Monday we rolled out an update to our Overall Ranking Performance report that should make it easier for you to quickly grasp the performance of any keyword in your SEO campaign.

 
In addition to search engine, campaign URL and keyword, the foundational columns in this rank progress report include:

• Start **** is the **** the keyword was added to the campaign if the keyword ranked in the top 500 search results on that day, otherwise it is the first **** that the keyword did rank in the top 500 of SERPs for the selected search engine.
  
• Start Rank is the first rank recorded by Rank Ranger for the keyword (that appeared within the top 500 search results).
• End **** is the **** you select in the Report Options **** field for this report.
  
• End Rank is the rank on the selected End ****.
  
• Overall Change is the difference between Start Rank and current report **** End Rank.

In this example, we can see that the keyword “iphone 6” was added to the campaign on 9/10/2014 with a Start Rank of 7 and an End Rank of 1 on 9/30/2014, which equals an Overall Change of 6 positions – an SEO accomplishment that we would expect for the manufacturer’s site on the Google Mobile search, but it’s still impressive to see those green arrows indicating improvement.

Also apparent in this report is that the “laptop” keyword has dropped 44 positions from 12 to 56 since January. Considering that we’re reviewing mobile search rankings, it’s possible that Apple’s mobile focus is not on their laptops as we do find them holding on page 2 of the Yahoo SERPs. 

If you notice unusual negative rank trends, we recommend using our On-Page Keyword Optimization tool to run an analysis on target landing pages to determine if further optimization is required.

Domain & Keyword Metrics

Optional columns that can be switched on in Report Options include these Keyword and Domain Metrics:

Google AdWords

• Average Monthly Volume displays the average number of global searches in a month for the specified keyword
  
• PPC Competition displays the domain’s PPC (Pay Per Click) ranking as High, Medium or Low based on the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword
  

MajesticSEO

• Indexed Pages displays the domain’s total number of pages indexed by MajesticSEO
  
• Domain Backlinks displays the total number of MajesticSEO domain backlinks
  
• Citation Flow displays the MajesticSEO Citation Flow metric, which is weighted by the number of citations to a given URL or Domain
  
• Trust Flow displays the MajesticSEO Trust Flow metric, which is weighted by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given URL or Domain

Ahrefs

• Indexed Pages displays the domain’s total number of pages indexed by Ahrefs
  
• Domain Backlinks displays the number of Ahrefs domain backlinks
  

I’ve enabled those metrics for the report we were reviewing above and now we can see that the “laptop” keyword had an average of 823,000 searches conducted during the past month which is probably the reason for the high AdWords pay-per-click competition, and possibly is related to the negative rank change if the volume and PPC have remained high since we started tracking this keyword.

We can also see that Ahrefs has 2.8 million pages indexed for Apple.com and is reporting over 1.2 billion domain backlinks. And MajesticSEO has almost 1.1 billion backlinks displayed and 29 million pages indexed for this domain, with a Citation Flow score of 96 (indicating strong link juice) and Trust Flow of 98 (indicating strong authority).

You’re Invited!

If you’re already using our SEO platform, I invite you to view the updated documentation, check out this upgraded report and let us know if it’s providing you with everything you need in an overall rank performance report. And if you’re not already a Rank Ranger customer, what are you waiting for?!  Register now for your free trial.

About The Author

Rank Ranger is an SEO Platform designed to standardize management and reporting for the digital marketing world by filling the need for a comprehensive online marketing platform capable of tracking & monitoring campaign data, integrated with 3rd party software and services, providing fully personalized and customized reporting, 100% white label automated reports and a branded web interface.