Checking rankings (default way)
How to check your site’s rankings in search engines
Rankings are updated with the help of a wizard. Please click Check rankings to activate it.
Check Rankings button on Keywords toolbar
Step 1: choose search engines
Please tick a search engine (or a group of search engines) you would like to promote your site in. Google, Yahoo! and Bing are great if your site is targeted towards US or international audience speaking English. Otherwise please consider search engines from an appropriate regional group.
You can access the full list of available search engines by clicking Add More SEs.
Step 2: search process
Rank Tracker has gone online and started checking your site’s rankings.
The process can take a while depending on the speed of your Internet connection, the number of search engines and keywords, and your rankings for these keywords. Say, if Rank Tracker finds your listing on page #1, it won’t have to drill deeper into them and will move on to the next keyword. As a result, the search process will be completed faster. Basically, the better a page ranks, the less time it will take to find it in search listings.
You can interrupt the search at any moment by clicking Stop (some of the keywords can remain unchecked in this case).
View task completion summary
When done, Rank Tracker will show you a brief keyword check summary.
Then please choose what you would like to do with the results you have just collected:
- Add them to your project (Finish),
- Discard them and exit the wizard (Cancel).
View current rankings
Rank Tracker will show you a table with your current ranking positions in selected search engines. You can edit your workspace to include the URLs found on search results pages, dates of the most recent checks and more.
Want to see the Google page your listing was found on? Click on a three-dotted button next to a ranking result to access the snapshot.
Evaluate ranking progress
Rank Tracker automatically saves the results of all ranking checks in the project file (you can find them in the History Records table). So if you want, you can switch to the Detailed View workspace and see how your current rankings compare to the previous ones.
Please find below a quick overview of statuses you can find in the Difference columns for your target search engines.
| Status | Meaning |
| +number (e.g.+3) | The rankings of the site for the keyword have gone a few positions up. |
| -number (e.g.-2) | The rankings of the site for the keyword have gone a few positions down. |
| Entered | The site has just appeared in top results for the keyword. |
| Stays out | The site does not appear in top results for the keyword yet. |
| Dropped | The site hasn’t been found in top results for the keyword this time. |
| There are no previous records to use for comparison. |
Customize difference calculations
By default, Rank Tracker compares your current rankings to the most recent ones. You can choose another group of results for comparison too. This is done through Preferences -> Misc. Project Settings -> Results to compare with.
Want to see the features in action? Watch our rank-tracking video or check out a sample keyword rankings report.