Serpstat Rank Tracker: A Complete Guide

If you are promoting a website, then analyzing its positions is an essential thing to track the effectiveness of such promotion; so you can study the results of your work or check your team.

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, 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:

But before moving on to the sections of this tab, you need to set up a project.

Go to your dashboard using this link, you will see a list of all the projects that you create.

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.

Enter the domain in the Serpstat search bar and click Search → Track domain. Done!

You can also click on the button Start tracking positions at the bottom of the Overview report.

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.

You can see the data from the modules Search Analytics and Backlink Analysis on the List of projects dashboard.

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

The user can go to the Keywords report either by clicking on the dashboard or through the side menu.

Further, when trying to switch to the Rank Tracker project, the user will receive a message that it is necessary to finish the project setup.

There are 4 tracking types in the tool:

• project domain only
• whole site;
• by exact URL;
• by URL Prefix.

This setting affects the output of position data on all reports.

A site mirror is a full or partial copy of the content of a site's content.

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.
  

Serpstat will also help you find your direct competitors. You need to go to Site Analysis → Domain Analysis → SEO Analysis → Competitors.

If you don't remember which days of the week you have chosen, then in the table you can see the following 10 scheduled checks: date and day of the week. In the same block, you will find information on the credits remaining on your account. If you run out of credits, you have an opportunity to buy additional ones.

Next, select Search regions. Using the new Rank Tracker, you can track positions in paid search results!

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:

After choosing a search engine, we need to select the type of search results that we will check.

We check the context separately from the organics not to mix the results, since we usually show the best position.

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

The list of regions is displayed after selecting a country and depending on it. The region field is available only to Google and is not obligatory. The peculiarity of Google is that we can check the search results at different levels of region settings. That is, both at the country or region level as well as at the city level.

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.

The list of languages (optional) becomes available after selecting a country. The language is automatically set depending on the selected country as the official language or the most popular language, if several are used in the country. It works when choosing any search engine.

You can see all the search regions that were added to the project and which will be checked.

If you need to disconnect the search region from the monitoring of search results and at the same time have access to the data that has already been collected, it is possible to deactivate the search region.

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.

Deactivating a region is an alternative to deleting the search region from the project, in which you had to contact the developer and spend time to get it back.

If users no longer work in a certain region, they can still see the data that they have collected and for which they paid.

The last step before starting tracking is to add keywords to the project.

General rules for keywords:

If you break the rule, then there will be no data on the search volume, since these are the rules set by Google and Yandex.

Keywords can be added to the project in several ways:

If you already have a ready-made list of keywords, you can add them through a textblock with a line break. It is not recommended to add more than 1000 keywords in this way, as the browser may work slowly.

This is an opportunity to add keywords relevant to the domain. After choosing a country and a search engine in the settings, the tool will offer 1000 unique keywords for your project.

Click Add. You can also add destination URLs for keywords by clicking on the appropriate button.

The expected URL is set to verify which URL is displayed in the search results and whether the actual one matches the expected one. This will help determine if the exact URL that we would like to see appears on the best position.

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.

If the client is interested in Yandex volume, then the following rules should be borne in mind when importing keywords:

Tags in the project are used to simplify data filtering by category of keywords. More than one tag can be attached to one keyword.

The file must be formatted. That is, in addition to the general requirements for keywords, there should be three columns.

We expect to get only keywords in the first column, each with a new line. In the second column, there is only the expected URL. In the third column, tags are separated by commas. If the URL is missing, then the second column should still be empty.

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:

Or link by link:

You can also select all keywords on the page as well as in the project. Previously, with a maximum pagination of 500 pages, users could select only 500 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.

Done! If you set up everything correctly, the monitoring will start the same day. And the next check will take place according to the schedule.

After Serpstat tracks domain positions, you will get 3 reports.

In the Keywords report, you can see basic information about the project's positions for the keywords added to the project. The report will display the highest domain position in the SERP .

Next, we see a graph of the distribution of positions by ranges. It shows the distribution for the selected domain by keyword. It is based on the selected domain, the time period and tags.

When you hover over a point, the graph shows the number of positions, their percentage of the total number in the project and the dynamics as a percentage compared to the previous check.

Now a little about navigation:

The next thing is the search. It works on all the keywords added to the project. Moreover, if you enter the phrase daxx, it will find both daxx and Daxx. In addition, it looks not only for the entire phrase, but also for parts of the word.

Next, we go to the table with two reports in it:

If there are more than 4 snippets in the search results for a keyword, they will be hidden in the dropdown. The last icon displays the number of hidden special elements. By clicking on this icon, you will see a dropdown with hidden elements that did not fit into the main report. The icons are arranged in the same order for convenience. By hovering the mouse over the icon, you can see the tooltips with the snippet name and check if the monitored domain has been noticed.

You can adjust the scale of the graph by dragging the borders of the scroll.

In the Competitors section you will find a report with a graph of the dynamics of changes in your positions in comparison with the top 100 competitors. To add competitors to the report, tick the check box next to the corresponding competitor.

It is possible to pin certain domains in a report using the pin button that appears when you hover over a domain. After that, such a domain will be assigned at the top for this user. Additionally, monitored domains are highlighted - green is our domain and blue are tracked competitors. Red - all domains that were found in SERPs, but were not included in the top 100 competitor domains.

The report helps determine if the tracked / expected URL matches the one that is in fact ranked in the SERP. As the actual URL, we display the one that has the highest position in the SERP.

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.