Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker Overview and Tutorial

Key Takeaways

August 2017 HS released a super visual and feature-rich Google rank checker tool fast for nine months and boom we made it even better now let me show you how to get the most out of the always improving hrs rank tracker tool stay tuned [Music] hey everyone it's Sam o here with eight trucks the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche and today I have the distinct privilege of showing you how to use hrs rank tracker tool to its full potential plus I get to show you some of the new and cool features that we've added based on your feedback and of course I'll be adding in some actionable tips to help you get the most out of tracking your Google rankings let's get into this thing first I'll quickly set up a project to give you a bit of context before we actually get into the reports and I'm gonna skip most of the project setup because it's self-explanatory and pretty standard among ranked record tools so I just want to note a few things number one when you're choosing your protocol I recommend leaving this part to HTTP plus HTTPS which will ensure that rank tracker picks up all of your rankings accurately next you'll need to enter in some keywords to track so you can type in your own list and separate each keyword with a comma like this or you can copy and paste in your own list which will automatically add the commas for you like this or you can click here to upload your own txt or CSV file since these are all keywords that we're targeting through our blog I can add a tag here to stay organized and right below that you'll see a list of keywords that you're already ranking for and some data so I'll just add a couple more here to our list once you're ready to add these to your project you can click the add to list button and you'll see our keywords appear on the right side so here you can add locations where you want us to track your keywords from and as of today we support ranking data from around 170 countries and we update them daily or weekly depending on your account level since hrs has customers worldwide I'll type in United States and select this one from the drop-down and I'll actually add Australia to the last thing is to add competitors and you can add up to five of them this step is quite important because we have an entire report where you can compare your organic search rankings your competitors which we'll get to in a bit for now I'll just click a few from this list which is based on websites that ranked in the top 10 for the same keywords as the site you're tracking all right so I already have a project that's been set up with historical data so I'm just gonna switch projects and we'll go through these four sections overview competitors metrics and grossing there are three main parts to the overview page the filters some expandable graphs in the raw ranking data I just want to outline a few of the filters first you have a toggle here where you can switch between your desktop and mobile rankings then we have the tag field to where you can isolate your data to only the keywords within the categories you've set so if I change this to only the blog keywords then you'll see all of the data change here as well as in the table below here you can isolate your result set down to just the countries you want to see ranking data from so if you remember when I set up the project I chose to track from the US and Australia the positions filter is pretty cool to where you can isolate the data by keyword position you can even just look at the keywords that have improved or declined in rankings or you can set your own custom filter so for example you can narrow down your data set to just keywords that rank from positions 11 to 15 which is the upper half of page 2 of the Google SERPs and after running the filter you can see in the data that one of the pages is our posts on longtail keywords and clicking through to the article you'll see that the post is about one and a half years old so this one might be due for an update or perhaps this is an article that we want to build more links to the last filter I want to touch on is the SERP features and this one is a little bit more advanced so I'll just give you one quick tip on using this filter if you want to optimize for featured snippets you can click that you don't rank radio button and then select only featured snippets and I'll apply the filter what this does is it shows you all of the keywords where a featured snippet is present in the Google search results but you don't currently own it from there you'll know which articles to optimize so you can fight for the so called position 0 all right so I've cleared the filters and I want to show you these really cool graphs first I'm going to set the date range to the past year so you can really see what this data looks like over time so with any of these little mini graphs you can click on it and then click on it again to hide them so if I click on the traffic graph you'll see that we've had some nice and steady growth across all of our tracked keywords also if you look at these flags here these show you when more keywords were added or removed which can also influence traffic growth next I'll show you the SERP features graph and this is one of the new updates in rank tracker which is a very helpful and a unique feature here you can see the total percentage of SERP features you own and right below that you can see the dynamics of your progress so you'll see that we had you know a nice little features bump around February 2018 and to your right you'll see a nice table with a breakdown on the features you own as well as the features that exist for your track keywords that you don't know now assert features they generally steal clicks away from the search results so by looking at this graph you can see if a certain feature type is growing here you'll see that the number of featured snippets has increased quite a bit for our track keywords so this would probably be something we'd want to optimize for another actionable takeaway would be to look at the AdWords bottom and top numbers if you see this growing then it means that your competitors are likely paying for your keywords so if I click on the AdWords top feature you can see that in q4 of 2017 our competitors were paying for ads on the keywords were targeting also you can use these graphs to better understand keyword intent for example if you're seeing that a lot of your track keywords have a ton of video surf features then it might be assigned to create video content around these topics in addition to your blog posts in our case you can see that the people also asked feature is quite prominent and if I click it you can see that there's been quite a bit of growth on this feature which tells us that with the keywords we're targeting people usually have additional questions or just want answers that are short and sweet finally is the positions graph and this one is pretty cool you can see the progression over time for clusters of your position rankings so you can see that they're all color-coded here so the darker the blue the higher your rankings and you can see that we've had some success in both ranking for more keywords as well as increasing our top three Google rankings across the board now down here you have the raw data with some self planetory metrics so it won't bother going through all of these but I do want to make a quick note on a few the first is the SERP features these are color-coded where blue means that you own that search feature and the gray ones mean that you don't own it but one of your organic search competitors do now this graph icon here is super cool if you click the icon then you can see both your desktop and mobile rankings plotted on a graph over time the other drop down here SERP shows you the top 10 pages on Google search results page for this keyword and you can see that it highlights your tracked website too now if you want to see more results you can click on one of these buttons at the bottom to see the next ten or all hundred results the last two things on this page are these tabs if we click on tags then you can get a snapshot of the performance of your groups of keywords for the selected timeframe and the pages tab shows you the URLs that are associated with your keyword rankings and it's worth noting that this traffic number and doesn't represent all of the search traffic the page gets this is based on just the tracked keywords so if you want to see the other keywords these pages rank for you can click the organic keywords drop down from here you can click the check boxes and click the green button at the top to add more relevant keywords to your project all right on to my favorite part of rank tracker and that's the competitor section this report is all about seeing how you match up against your competition and we recently updated the UI here to make it super user-friendly so here you can see that it has the same three parts the filters the graphs and the data table and you can use the filters as we did before to narrow down the data you want to see again with the graphs they're all clickable but the key difference is that you can see your competitors on the same interactive graph which makes it super insightful and actually quite fun to monitor as for the data table tell me how easy this is the skin each column here shows you the domain and the position ranking as at the last update so look at this one for the keyword phrase broken link building you can see that it's a keyword that all three of us have created content around and if we click on the icon here it'll pull up positions Explorer where we can now see the progress of everyone's ranking history and if I set it to the past year you can see all of our rankings literally for every single day since we started tracking this keyword now there are also a few extra filters here where you can switch it from the positions view to the traffic or surf features view in just like the overview section there's a tab to see a quick performance report for your tag keywords based on visibility percentage or traffic finally is the pages tab which is really helpful since we pull the top 100 search results for every single keyword you put in to rank tracker we aggravate this data to show the total market share of the keywords across all pages and websites that were found in the search results so here we can see the pages that also rank for our keywords in the percentage of total traffic the pages account for across our list of track keywords you can also see the total number of keywords that the page ranks for based on your tracked keywords so when you're using this report it might make more sense to filter by tag so you can focus on specific niches or topics and see who dominates them now this sell filter here domains is ultra cool because it shows you all of the other organic search competitors based on your track keywords so you can see here that monitor backlinks in word stream get a decent amount of traffic for a good number of keywords that we're tracking so it might be worth adding them to my list of competitors all I would need to do is click on this add two competitors drop down then I probably choose domain and if you want to narrow this down to just you and your track competitors you can easily just toggle the switch here the third section metrics acts as a nice little shortcut as you can see here all of the important keyword metrics that you would normally find in keywords Explorer are available in this table so you can use this as a quick reference if you wanted to check in on the keyword metrics for your tracked keywords and we automatically update all of these metrics every month so the search volume and clicks data will always be fresh finally is the grossing section and I personally love this one because you can see the increases and decreases in your keyword positions over set periods of time it'll literally takes no longer than one minute to look at these to spot big changes that might require your attention finally if you're not the type to obsess over your keyword rankings and check every day we'll send you an awesome email report either weekly or monthly depending on your notification settings so you can quickly go through your rankings report on your commute or whenever it's convenient for you we are constantly evolving our rank tracker tool and actually all of the SEO tools within a dress and it's because of the awesome feedback that we've gotten from community members like you so I encourage you to go into rank tracker and rather than looking at your rankings and thinking sweet my rankings increased or darn my rankings are dying to go in with an analytical approach and use this data to get more traffic to your website make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials and if you're looking for more educational content on how you can take your SEO to the next level just click the icon up here and you'll find a couple helpful playlists on big topics like link building and keyword research so from all of us here at HS we want to thank you guys for caring and contributing to making HS rank tracker tool the best it can be samo signing out you