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Rank Tracker Overview

Everything you need to know, to track rankings like a pro

Matthew Davis avatar
Written by Matthew Davis
Updated over a week ago

Rank Tracking Overview

AgencyAnalytics' co-founder created his first rank tracker in high school back in the early 2000s, when Alta Vista was still just as important in the space as Google. He leveraged that experience a few years later to create one of the first commercially available rank trackers. And our entire platform grew out of that product!

As a result, we take rank tracking seriously. We've continuously honed our tracker into the accurate, feature-rich, and easy to use tool that it is today. 

And in this article, we'll cover everything that you need to know to become an AgencyAnalytics rank tracking power user. 

The Basics

Here's how to add keywords
Here's how to delete keywords
Here's how to "Select All"

Rankings are updated once every 24 hours. We track out to 100 positions for Google, 20 positions for Google Local, 50 positions for Bing, and 100 positions for Google Mobile. 

Yes, you can purchase access to track more keywords. Just follow these steps

Metrics and Columns

To determine which metrics are displayed in the chart toward the bottom half of the page, click the "settings slider" and tick the boxes for the metrics that you'd like to display. Note that this is only for your own view; we'll talk about setting up the view for customers later. Learn more about enabling/disabling the different metrics here.

Working with Locations

As you're probably aware, all SERP results across every major search engine now use the searcher's location as a ranking factor. Searching for a specific keyword from Los Angeles, CA could give very different results versus searching that same keyword from Omaha, NE.

As a result, we let you track each keyword from as many separate locations as you'd like.

In order to see which location is being tracked for each keyword, you'll need to enable the "Locations" column in the chart.

Not sure which locations to track or how to format your location based keywords? We've got you covered.

Important Settings

Some of the settings in our rank tracker can dramatically impact the way that your rankings are reported. If we're not picking up rankings for your site or the rankings look wrong, odds are that you have one of these settings misconfigured.

Reports & Dashboards 

A variety of rank tracking widgets are available for both the scheduled reports and the client marketing dashboards. 

Rank tracking widgets are found by clicking "Edit Dashboard" to enter Edit mode and then clicking on the "Integrations" tab and scrolling down. You'll then be able to drill down through Rankings and select your widget style and desired metrics from there.

Once you've added a widget, you can decide which metrics show up on the widget - and apply additional customizations to the widget - by clicking the widget's ellipsis ("...") at the top right corner.

In a hurry? Create a client dashboard using our pre-configured SEO template. Same idea for creating a quick SEO report.

Customer Settings

To determine which metrics your customers will see when they login, you'll need to configure the permissions in the rank tracking section for each customer account. 

So for example, if you want customers to see the "Location" column, but don't want them to see rankings for Google Local, you'd tick the box in their permission area for Location, and untick the box for Google Local.

Want to let clients add their own keywords? Here's how. Unfortunately, it's not possible to set a keyword quote for clients at this time.

Tags and Filters

Tags and filters simplify the job of working with large keyword sets on the agency end. And they allow you to show clients different groups of keywords in separate widgets to better showcase SEO performance.

Exporting and Importing Rankings Data

If you need to work with your rankings data outside of our platform, you can download a spreadsheet via the "download" button at the top right of your dashboard. Your admin can also do a full export of any campaign, which gives you a deeper level of rankings information.

You also have two ways of importing rankings data. First, you can automatically import data from a wide range of other rank tracking providers. If your provider isn't listed there, you can manually import data with these instructions (just ensure the file is formatted correctly for our system).

Troubleshooting

Rank tracking is as much an art as a science. Reconciling rankings seen on two different systems is just a part of providing SEO services to clients.

If you're checking rankings on your end using a standard Google search, Incognito mode, or any method that involves opening a browser on your computer and typing in a keyword, you're going to get inaccurate results; we're not able to change our rankings to match those results.

If rankings don't look right, please start with this article to troubleshoot. 99% of the time, the issue is something described in that article. We'll know whether you've actually read it ;-)

Curious about how we fetch rankings from a technical standpoint? Learn more here.

Keyword rankings say "Not Found"? Here's what that means.

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