You probably spend a lot of time looking for the perfect keywords to use in your articles. Then comes the challenge of adding them while making everything sound natural. If you do it right, you get more traffic, but it’s hard to know when your efforts actually pay off.
That’s why it’s important to check your blog post rankings from time to time. That way, you’ll know if the keywords you’re targeting are working out. Plus, you’ll get information on how your posts are doing in the search engines, which is always great to know.
In this article, we’re going to talk a bit more about why you should check your keyword rankings. Then we’ll teach you how to check your blog post rankings in two steps. Let’s talk about SEO!
Why You Should Be Checking Your Keyword Rankings
Before we talk about why it’s important to check your blog post rankings, let’s talk about keyword optimization. In most cases, you’ll optimize each of your blog posts to target a specific keyword (or words). For example, I’m shooting for ‘check your blog post rankings’ for this particular article.
The idea is that by using that keyword throughout your blog post, it’ll come up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) when someone looks for it. In practice, there are a lot of factors that determine how well you rank for a keyword beyond just adding it to your article a bunch of times.
Keyword optimization is a key aspect (pardon the pun) of SEO. However, in some cases, your posts might not rank for the exact keywords you were shooting for. To find out this information, you’ll need to use an analytics tool.
It’s important to check your keyword rankings from time to time to see if your strategy is working. It might be you need to switch up the type of keywords you’re targeting or the way you’re optimizing your content.
Finally, it’s essential to understand that although your posts might not be ranking well for the keywords you want, they might still come up during other searches. The idea behind keyword optimization is to maximize your chances for specific queries. However, search engines should still display your pages if they’re relevant in other cases. In my experience, it often ends up being that some of my posts end up doing great with keywords I wasn’t even trying to target. Let’s talk about how to find out if that’s happening for you!
How to Check Your Blog Post Rankings (In 2 Steps)
To check your blog post rankings, you’ll need to use an analytics tool. We’re big fans of Google Analytics, but for this particular task, we recommend SEMrush instead.
Step #1: Get Acquainted With SEMRush
SEMrush is a marketing and SEO tool you can use to check how your page is doing in the SERPs (sorry for all the acronyms!). It’s pretty easy to use, although there’s a lot of depth to its reports if you really want to dig in.
The downside is, like most other SEO tools, it’s rather expensive, with plans starting at $99 per month. However, you can use SEMrush for free to run up to ten searches per month. All you have to do is enter an URL on the tool’s homepage and click on Start Now:
Keep in mind – after a few searches, SEMRush will ask you to sign up to continue using its service and to get access to those ten free queries each month.
Before we move on, go ahead and make a list of the posts you want to check up on using SEMrush. Remember, you have a limited number of queries with your free account, so I recommend focusing on your best posts to see if they’re ranking for the right keywords.
It’s also worth noting that tools like SEMrush don’t work that well for recent pages or posts. That’s because they need time to gather data, so we recommend only analyzing posts that are at least a couple of months old.
Step #2: Check Your Blog Post Rankings
Once you enter an URL into SEMrush and run a search, you’ll see a result page like this one:
If you pay attention to the ORGANIC SEARCH section at the top, you’ll see the post I analyzed is ranking for 817 keywords. That goes to show that sometimes you end up getting traffic for keywords you weren’t even aiming for, even if it’s only a few clicks.
What we’re really interested in, though, are your posts’ top keywords. To find out what those are, scroll down and look for the TOP ORGANIC KEYWORDS section, which should look like this:
To the right of each keyword, you’ll see two columns. The Pos. column tells you where you rank on the SERPs for that keyword and you can also see how much volume its bring in. For this case, our primary keyword was ‘rate per word.’ However, due to how competitive it is, we’re actually pulling more volume for niche keywords, such as ‘how much is 250 words.’
Ideally, the keyword you were targeting should show up in this section. If it doesn’t, then it might be due to one of two reasons:
- You need to revise your SEO strategy and the way you use keywords.
- That keyword is too competitive, so you’re not ranking well for it.
To fix that first issue, I recommend you take a look at our Start a Blog guide. It covers all the SEO basics you need to know, so it’s a good read even if you’ve been running a blog for a while.
As for the second issue, consider using unique word combinations that really target your niche.
Conclusion
Organic traffic is key to the growth of most blogs. That means to succeed, you need to have a solid SEO strategy in place, and you need to target the right keywords. If everything else works out, those keywords will bring you a lot of traffic and they’ll keep doing so as long as people continue to look for them.
The problem is, once you publish an article, knowing if your keywords are working out isn’t that simple. You’ll need to use an analytics tool to get access to that data, such as SEMrush (which offers a free account). With it, you’ll be able to analyze individual blog posts and figure out what keywords they’re ranking for.
Do you have any questions about how to check your blog post rankings? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.