Serpstat Rank Tracker: A Complete Guide


You'll find it out if you read this article :)
2. Why you should check site positions in search engines
3. How to work with Rank Tracker? + 3 ways to create a project
4. How to set up the project?
- General settings
- Search regions
- Keywords
5. What reports are available in the tool?
- Keywords
- Competitors
- URLs
Do you track positions in another service?
Rank tracker at Serpstat allows get the list of keywords for a project, analyze competitors' websites in SEO and PPC, compare their traffic, positions, and dynamic of keywords quantity.
To transfer projects to Serpstat, contact our technical support — they will assist you and explain the details.
The process will take about 2-3 hours!
WHY DO I NEED TO CHECK SITE POSITIONS IN SEARCH?
Most SEO professionals select a list of 20-30 queries which they want to rank for in the top 10, and then monitor the position of the pages of their site in search engines for these queries.
However, this is not quite the right approach. Some keywords are likely to be missed, and you won't know the real dynamics of your development, especially against the background of other sites from search results. And the place on the market that you occupy will remain a mystery.
In Serpstat search engine rank tracking software, you can download the maximum number of keywords (depending on your pricing plan), divide them into groups by topics, and then track both the positions of your site and the positions of your competitors. You will receive all the summary information on the top 100:
- keywords positions in organic and paid search results;
- keyword distribution history;
- competitors data;
- market share.
Rank Tracker menu looks like this:

how to work with the rank tracker
This is where the data for the selected domain will be stored:
- keywords from organic and paid search results;
- list of referring domains and pages;
- site audit data (which must first be launched);
- distribution of keywords by positions in the top;
- the number of shares of the domain's main page.
There are several ways to create a new project:
From the homepage:
From the overview:
A pop-up opens with the entered project domain, substituted by the name of the project, which can be changed as you like. The project group is default. It can also be changed.
After you checked all the fields and made sure that everything is correct - click the Create button.

In the list of projects:
From this dashboard you can also launch a site audit and start tracking positions. Click Start Tracking button or the gear icon.


HOW TO SET UP THE PROJECT?
General settings:

- project domain only
- whole site;
- by exact URL;
- by URL Prefix.
This feature is useful if:
- the project was created long ago, but the website moved to another domain, and you don't want to lose historical data;
- you have two sites on different domains, but you use the same keywords to track positions. The first domain is a mirror of another and, in fact, leads to the same site, but there may be links to one or the other.





Advantages of manual position check:
- in manual mode, you can select only those regions and phrases you want to get current positions for;
- manual mode will allow you to check the project positions even several times a day;
- if there have been changes on your site recently and you need to check the current positions, our manual update will solve this problem.

Search regions:
To begin with, we will choose which search engine the check will go on, since the set of available regions and cities will depend on it.
Currently available:

The list of countries becomes available after selecting a search engine and depends on it.

When you select the Yandex search engine, the "Region" field is not displayed.
The list of cities becomes available after selecting a region in the previous field. Optional for Google, but required for Yandex. This is due to the feature of the settings: in Yandex you can see the search results only by selecting a city, you can't see the search results by country.

If you delete a search region that already had the data, and then add it again in the form in which it was originally, then all historical data on it will be available again.
If a region is deactivated, data won't be collected and no credits will be spent. If all search regions in the project are deactivated, data collection will stop.
The region can be activated again and data will be collected.

If users no longer work in a certain region, they can still see the data that they have collected and for which they paid.
Keywords:
General rules for keywords:
Keywords can be added to the project in several ways:


It is possible to connect expected URLs to imported keywords. A keyword can only have one URL per search region. That is, if we have three regions and one keyword in the project, you can add a maximum of three URLs, one for each combination of keyword + search region.
- English
- Turkish
- Russian
- Ukrainian
- Belarusian
- "+"
- "!"
- ' -'
- '- '
- string[0] == '-'
- '--' in string
- point
- apostrophe
- (
- )
- \
- "

Especially if you have a project with several topics or an online store. Thus, tags will help not only to look at data by groups of keywords, but also to manage them.

If you added keywords to the project but forgot to add expected URLs and tags, then this can be done either through operations in bulk for all selected keywords:


By default, all phrases on the page are highlighted, and if necessary, you can choose the option - all phrases in the project. The counter next to the heading shows the number of selected keywords.

What reports are available in the tool
Keywords:

- keyword;
- best position;
- volume;
- snippets;
- date added.
- csv
- xls
- xlsx
- selected domain;
- date or period;
- filtering by tag;
- filtering by region;
- filter;
- sorting.


Keywords that have no data are not displayed.

If one day and several regions - the data is summarized.

By default, the primary domain for which the project is created is selected. The dropdown displays both aliases and competitors added in settings.
There is a separate category Without tags in the dropdown - it will help you find all the keywords without tags.
The counter will show how many keywords are attached to this or that tag.
Or, if there is one major project, and several experts are working on it. Not to manually select keywords, you can do this using tags. Even when exporting, the report is saved as the user sees it.



- With one day selected, data for the day and the dynamics of positions with the previous check are displayed.
- With the selected period, the dynamics of the positions between the two dates within the period is displayed.

With one day selected, you can see a table of keywords, volume and positions for that day.
For the selected period, the table displays the columns for each day from the selected period in separate columns.


You see dates of checks, domains and their positions are displayed.
- Gray icon: the snippet was fixed by a keyword with a page of another domain.
- Blue icon: the snippet was fixed by a keyword with a page for the analyzed domain.


- X - for regions with context. It is displayed if the check has passed, but there was no context.
- NA - no data.

Title, URL, Description are displayed inside the snippet.
The dynamics are shown next to the previous value. If the project had only one check, then the block with the storm is not displayed. The value can range from 0% to 100%.
0% - no domain has changed its position;
0−40% - normal change in position;
40% −80% - serious changes are occurring in the ranking algorithm.
You need to check the storm for other keywords.
100% - none of the domains remained at their previous position.
Most likely, there was some kind of update in the search engine. It is necessary to monitor the news.
Next, we count the number of points at the intersection of these domains in the top and display them according to the number of points.
We take today's top 100 (Google) / top 50 (Yandex) and go to the positions:
- if the site's position has not changed - 0 points;
- if the position has changed, but the site has remained within the TOP-100 + | X | points, where X is the difference between yesterday and today's positions;
- if the site has got out of search results- +100 points.
- The result is divided by 10 000.
Competitors:

- range distribution;
- traffic distribution;
- visibility distribution.

URLs
We display only those keywords for which at least one actual URL was found in the search results. If the search result didn't have an actual URL, but at the same time the expected URL is attached to the keyword, then we still won't show it.

- All keywords. All keys by which the domain was found in the top are displayed. That is, if the expected URL was not found for the keyword, then the keyword will not be displayed.
- Expected URL attached. All keywords by which the domain was found in the top are displayed, but the expected URL is not attached.
- Without expected URL. All keywords by which the domain was found in the top are displayed and the target URL is set.
- URLs are different. All keywords by which the domain was found in the top and the URL with the highest position is different from the given.

If you have questions about any of them, feel free to ask them in the comments under this article or contact our Customer support team.
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