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How to track keyword rankings for a blog, and which keywords to pick
How to track keyword rankings comes down to three methods, and most blogs end up using two of them at once: a free source for the full list of what you rank for, and a tracker for the keywords that matter enough to watch every day. Which keywords belong on that shorter list is the harder question, and it’s where most trackers end up wasted on the wrong ones.
How to track keyword rankings: three ways
- By hand. Search each keyword in a private window and note the position. Free, and it shows exactly what a reader sees, but it doesn’t scale past a handful of keywords and leaves no history.
- Search Console. Free, covers every query your site has ever appeared for, and reports clicks and impressions alongside an average position. Its limit is the average itself: it blends every day and every one of your pages into one number for the date range, so it can’t show you today’s position or date a change to a specific day.
- A tracker. Checks a fixed list of keywords on a schedule, usually daily, and keeps a daily history. This is the only method that answers “did the edit I made yesterday move anything,” because it’s the only one with a position for each day.
How to pick keywords
A tracker is only as useful as the list you give it. Three sources fill that list, in order of priority:
- One keyword per post. The phrase the post was written for. If you can’t name it in one phrase, that’s worth fixing before you track anything.
- The phrase the post already ranks for, if it differs from the one you intended. Search Console often shows a post ranking for a phrase you didn’t target. Track that one too, because it’s already working and worth defending.
- The keywords a competitor ranks for that you don’t. These aren’t for tracking yet; they’re the source of your next posts. A competitor keyword check returns up to 20 of them for any two domains, with monthly searches and the competitor’s position, in about 20 seconds and no signup.
Skip keywords with no real search volume behind them and skip near-duplicates of a phrase you already track. A tracker fills up fastest with variations of the same three words.
How many keywords a blog needs
A rough guide, by post count:
| Posts on the site | Keywords worth tracking |
|---|---|
| Under 20 | 10 to 20 |
| 20 to 75 | 50 to 100 |
| Over 75 | 150 to 300 |
The number grows slower than the post count, because not every post earns a keyword worth watching daily. A post with no impressions in Search Console after a few months isn’t ranking for anything yet, so there’s nothing to track. Ahrefs’s Starter plan caps tracking at 50 keywords, which a blog with 60 posts and one keyword each already exceeds; Semrush’s cheapest SEO plan covers 500 but starts at $139 a month, most of it for tools a one-person blog on a keyword-tracking budget won’t open.
Country and device
A keyword’s position depends on where the search happens and what it happens on. A US blog read mostly on phones should track on mobile, in the United States; a desktop-only check on the same keyword can read several places higher or lower, because Google serves different result layouts and sometimes different pages by device. Set the country, language, and device to match where your actual readers search, not the default a tool ships with, or the number you track won’t match the traffic you get.
What to do with the numbers each week
A daily number is only useful if something happens with it on a schedule. Each week:
- Note which tracked keywords moved, up or down, since last week.
- Check whether a competitor now outranks you on any of them.
- Look at the keywords in positions 8 to 20 with real impressions in Search Console. These are close enough to move with a single edit rather than a new post.
- Decide, for the week’s list of gap keywords, which one is worth writing next.
GapDigest checks every tracked keyword daily and does the first three of those automatically in a report that goes out each week, alongside a post plan for the gap keywords worth writing. Ten keywords track free, against one competitor, with no card and no time limit. Pricing covers a site with more posts and more competitors to watch.