How to Use Rank Tracker for Keyword Research and Rank Checking (2023)

Let’s go through all modules in Rank Tracker and see how to find new keyword ideas, track your rankings, explore top competitors, and do many other things in bulk and in one place.

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To get started, just download and install Rank Tracker's free version if you haven't done this yet. You'll be able to play around with as many projects as you need and test most of the tool’s features. To save your projects and enjoy the unlimited functionality of Rank Tracker, you’ll need to get equipped with a Rank Tracker license.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:18 Create your first project
00:38 See what you can do in the main workspace
06:44 Find new keyword ideas using different research methods
11:03 Get insights on 50 top-ranked pages for any keyword
12:40 Find your competitors
15:32 Create customizable reports
17:44 Set up alerts to get notified about any anomalies happening in your projects

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Closed Caption:

Hi guys and welcome back.
This is Mary from SEO PowerSuite, the all-in-one
toolkit that covers every aspect of SEO.
In this video I’m gonna share with you how
you can set up your first project as well
as describe the main features and settings
which are available in the software.
As soon as you install Rank Tracker on your
computer you will find the application icon
on your desktop.
Just double-click to start the application.
Once the application starts it will offer
you to create your first project, so you have
to enter the domain name that you would like
to monitor and click Finish.
As soon as the project is ready, you will
find your default project workspace which
displays all of your project records.
It allows you to create sub-workspaces that
include specific sets of columns, apply individual
filtering, rearrange the columns, or sort
the records by any factor.
As you can see, Rank Tracker collected your
target keywords and their ranking positions
in the certain search engine.
By default Rank Tracker analyzes your domain
and offers the search engines which are associated
with your country.
If you would like to check and monitor your
positions in other countries or say choose
another search engine…Bing or Yahoo for
example, just click Preferences - the 'Prefered
search engines' button and this will open
up a list of countries and search engines
which are available for you to add to the
project.
Press the plus button and the respective search
engine will be added to your list.
Click okay.
Then click the Edit visible columns button.
This will open a list of different columns
available for you to add to the current workspace.
Here we need to select Bing US Rank.
There you go.
The new column was added and now is visible
in your workspace.
If you want to get rid of some columns, you
just click the same Edit visible columns button.
Here you can see which columns are visible
now.
Click on the cross to remove unnecessary columns.
If you would like to export the results from
this workspace, there are two ways you can
do that.
If you have an enterprise license, click this
quick CSV export button and the software will
save the results in a CSV file to your local
hard drive.
If you have a professional license, you can
copy the results from the workspace and insert
them into Excel or Google Sheets.
Rank Tracker allows you to monitor not only
the positions of your main project domain
but also to add competitors to your current
project.
To add a competitor, open Preferences, Competitors,
click Add, and then type in the address of
the competitor that you would like to monitor.
Click OK, and as you see now we have the new
website added to the project, so your rank
column splits into two columns.
So the first one is for your project domain
and the second one is for the competitor and
if you click Check Rankings once again now,
the software will update positions both for
your main project domain and for your competitors
as well.
The Professional version lets you monitor
up to five competitors per project, while
in the Enterprise license you are able to
add up to 40 competitors.
Apart from the exact ranking positions, in
Rank Tracker there are several metrics that
can help you evaluate the quality of your
keywords.
These metrics include Keyword Effectiveness
Index (or KEI) and keyword difficulty.
Let’s have a look at them.
The keyword difficulty metric is located at
the bottom of your workspace.
It’s a percentage value estimating the work
required to get a website to show up on page
1 for a given keyword in a given search engine
listings.
Basically it indicates how tough your competitors
are.
The higher the score, the more difficult it
will be for you to outrank your top ten competitors.
Once you update keyword difficulty, it will
show you the list of top 10 ranking competitors,
and for every competitor it will provide the
page strength score and a few other metrics
such as Page In-Link Rank, Domain In-Link
Rank, the total number of sites linking to
that specific ranking page, and also the total
number of sites linking to that domain.
Check the difficulty score of every competitor
and decide whether you wish to try and compete
for that keyword or not.
If you see that the difficulty score is over
70%, that means that your competitors are
really tough, and it will take you a lot of
time, effort and money to get you to the top
ten results.
In such a case, it makes sense not to try
and not to compete for this specific keyword
but try a long-tail keyword or search for
synonyms.
Now what about the keyword effectiveness index.
You may find this metric if you enable the
Edit workspace menu, type KEI and add this
column to your workspace.
It helps you determine the usefulness and
efficiency of your keywords.
KEI indicates the ratio between competition
and search volume.
The search volume is the number of people
who are trying to search for that keyword
regularly in Google.
And the higher is the search volume and the
lower is the number of competitors, the high
is going to be the KEI index.
So basically the idea is to look through the
KEI column and search for keywords that have
high KEI.
They will be marked with the green color and
you might expect a lot of traffic from these
keywords.
Taking into account these two metrics can
help you evaluate the quality of your keywords
and whether it's worth promoting your website
for them or not.
Okay, and what if you want to see not only
ranking positions, but also the list of competitors
who are trying to compete for a certain keyword
and who are already in the top list of results?
Well, you can do it with Rank Tracker as well.
Go to the SERP details and click Record SERP
data.
Rank Tracker will quickly collect and provide
you with the list of top 30 ranking competitors
for that selected keyword.
And every time you check rankings this list
will get updated.
You will see how the list of competitors changes
over time, how Google algorithms affect them,
see if your competitors have applied new approaches
in their SEO campaign, and more.
If you would like to get new keyword suggestions
and keyword ideas from Rank Tracker, you need
to go to the Keyword Research section.
This module contains different research methods
and this is the perfect place where you can
get thousands of new keyword ideas.
All these methods are available for you.
Let’s have a closer look.
Ranking keywords.
This is one of the most popular modules used
by our users.
It helps you find the list of words and phrases
that a domain is already ranking in Google
for the specified region.
This is a good method to use when doing your
competition research or when you need to find
new search queries that your website is already
performing well for, but which you are not
aware of yet.
All you have to do is to enter the domain
that you would like to analyze, click search,
and just within a few seconds you will see
a table with your list of collected keywords
and also several additional widgets that will
provide you with the following stats:
Keywords - the total amount of keywords that
have been collected for your target URL.
Traffic - estimated number of visitors, that
have come to your target URL through the collected
keywords.
SERP features - the distribution of keywords
across Google SERP features.
For every keyword here, you can see the exact
ranking position, search volume, organic traffic,
competition, keyword difficulty.
Remember that if you want to add more metrics,
click the edit visible columns button, and
choose what you need.
You may also specify your targeting settings.
Select your preferred region, type of results
and the search depth.
The next module which is available for you,
is called Keyword Gap.
It lets you run a side-by-side comparison
of up to 5 domains, to explore the differences
and similarities between their keyword profiles
and yours.
Identify the gaps in your competitors' strategies,
discover the keywords unique to your domain
or to any of your competitors, detect the
keywords all competitors rank for but you,
investigate keyword overlaps between competitors,
and more.
To start researching, enter your project domain
URL in the field, and then add your competitor
that you would like to monitor.
Here you can also select the research method.
Hit the Search button, and the program will
take a few moments to collect the ranking
keywords for each of the domains in the chosen
search engine, gather the efficiency metrics
for them, and sort the results based on the
conditions you've set up.
In the example, you can see that the tool
has collected all the keywords that our competitor
is ranking for, but our project website is
not ranking yet, so this can give us a lot
of good ideas on what keywords to use in our
SEO campaign.
You are free to use other search methods as
well.
For instance you may connect your Google Search
Console or Google Analytics accounts and to
pick up some suggestions from them, you may
use Keyword planner to get suggestions from
Google Adwords Keyword planner, use autocomplete
tools from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube,
Ask or Yandex for keyword inspiration; Related
Searches, TF-IDF explorer, and keyword combinations.
All the suggestions that you get from Rank
Tracker are automatically saved in the Keyword
Sandbox.
The Keyword Sandbox allows you to:
Keep all the found keywords in one place for
future use or for a more in-depth analysis
Pick the most SEO-efficient keywords and move
them to Target Keywords in bulk, in two clicks
Keep the 'bad fit' keywords blacklisted so
they won't pop up during further research
Moreover, it automatically groups keywords
into semantic categories, which allows you
to manage your time more effectively and work
with the ready-made groups.
If you find some useful suggestions, you may
easily move those keywords from the keyword
research to the target keywords module, our
main workspace.
To move a keyword from one section to another,
select your keywords, right-click, choose
Move Selected Keywords To Rank Tracking, move
with current groups.
Now if we go back to our project, we will
find these keywords in the list.
The next module which is available for you
in Rank Tracker is called SERP Analysis.
SERP Analysis helps you get comprehensive
insights on the 50 top-ranked pages for any
keyword.
This will let you evaluate the effort it would
take to outrank the competitors, as well as
detect the factors that help the pages rank
as high.
How to run SERP analysis?
First, jump to the module, choose the search
engine, and enter the keyword you'd like to
analyze.
Click Analyze SERP.
Once the analysis starts, you may get asked
for a Google PageSpeed Insights API key if
you don't have one in your project yet.
The API key is required to check the Core
Web Vitals factors for the top-ranked pages,
and can be generated on Google's end in a
few clicks.
Once the analysis is done, you'll see the
top widget with the Keyword Difficulty score
and the keyword's SEO/PPC metrics.
The graph on the right lets you see how the
top 50 ranking pages are distributed by the
metric of your choice.
RankTracker calculates the correlation between
the distribution of the pages across the SERP,
and their results for the selected metric.
The table below lists the top 50 ranking URLs
and a variety of metrics for each:
Overall page strength (based on which the
Keyword Difficulty is calculated for the keyword)
Authority and backlink factors
Domain traffic and ranking keywords
Page's performance score and whether it passes
the Core Web Vitals assessment
The widget above the table shows the SERP
Average for the most prominent factors.
Let’s move on.
The next module in Rank Tracker is called
competitor research.
By using competitor research, you may discover
your main competitors in the niche you're
trying to promote your website in.
Once you switch to the competitor research
module, you will see three methods, Domain
competitors, Topic Competitors, and Top pages.
The domain competitors method allows you to
discover your major SEO competitors.
This can help you get a comprehensive picture
and uncover the websites/pages you compete
with, for overall visibility across the SERPs.
You may either enter your root domain here,
or even specify an exact landing page.
Click search and now we'll find the list of
competitors that are trying to promote their
websites in the same niche as your project
domain.
Here they are.
For each competitor, you can see different
stats, including intersection rate by keywords,
The number of keywords unique to your domain,
unique to competitor's domain, intersecting
ones, and the total competitor's keywords
number, and of course organic traffic over
the last 30 days.
The second method is called topic competitors.
It allows you to discover your niche competitors
based on your topic keywords.
Type in the list of your topic keywords or
keywords describing the niche which you'd
like to find the competitors for.
To enter multiple keywords, hit Enter after
each keyword.
Rank Tracker will pick up and provide us with
the results within just a few seconds.
As you see, it has collected the results based
on our target keywords.
And again for every competitor here we are
able to check different data.
Last but not least method in this section
is the Top Pages method.
It lets you pull pages a website is ranking
for organically in Google in your target region.
Let’s see how it works.
Enter the URL that you would like to research,
select the search mode and click Search.
The search is done and we can see a Summary
widget at the top.
The widget shows:
The total number of pages found for the target
domain/directory based on given targeting
setting
The overall number of visitors the target
domain received, through all its organic keywords
over the last 30 days
The total value of the traffic it received
through all its organic keywords should it
have been purchased via GoogleAds
The total number of organic keywords found
for the target website/directory/page based
on given targeting setting
The table below lists the found pages and
different metrics including organic traffic,
traffic value, page in-link rank, top keyword
that has brought the most traffic to the page,
and more!
That's how the competition research module
works in Rank Tracker.
In all SEO PowerSuite tools including Rank
Tracker, you may find the reporting section.
In this section, you are able to save and
publish reports based on the statistical information
Rank Tracker has collected for you.
Please note that white-labeled reporting is
available only for the enterprise- level users,
so if you are the professional user then you
can only review them inside the software or
print them out with the watermark.
If you purchase an Enterprise license, then
you are able to quickly save these reports
either in HTML or PDF format.
To do that click this Quick Save button and
then select a place on a hard drive where
the reports should be saved.
There is also an option on how you may publish
your reports online.
Just click this share button and Rank Tracker
will generate a shareable link you may copy
and open in your external browser.
You can send this link to your clients, and
they will be able to see the same report online
which you have here.
As you can see, there are several templates
available for you, but they are customizable
which means that you may add or remove widgets
from these reports in any way you like.
To edit a report template, click this edit
button, and this will open up the template
window which you can scroll down.
If you want to remove a widget, click the
delete this widget button and it will be deleted
from your report.
And if you’d like to add something, click
plus (+) next to the necessary widget and
it will be immediately added.
Moreover, you can edit widget settings as
well and select the types of information that
should be included in this specific widget
as well.
If you want to change the language of your
report or the style, there is an additional
Settings button which you may switch to, and
select another color, font, or language.
So choose it, click OK, save and now you have
the reports in your selected theme.
And again you may deliver your reports online,
there are several options for you
available if you have an enterprise license.
There is one more thing that I would like
to add about Rank Tracker, and the settings
available there.
Since Rank Tracker and all SEO PowerSuite
tools are desktop applications, this means
that all the tasks that you want to perform
should be started manually.
No matter what you are going to do, checking
ranking, updating the KEI factor, you’ll
do it manually.
It’s clear that if you have many projects
and you do not have much time, there should
be a way to optimize your work and automate
your tasks.
And Rank Tracker has it.
It's called Scheduler.
To create a scheduled task, Click Schedule
Tasks & Alerts in your workspace, click Add
and select the type of the tasks that you
would like to add.
For example you would like to automatically
check rankings, select this type of task,
click Next and choose your involved project.
At Step 3, choose your timing settings and
give the name for that task.
Hit finish and now the task is ready.
At the given day and time Rank Tracker will
automatically update your ranking positions.
Please note that to be able to do that you
have to keep your computer running and Rank
Tracker should be also running otherwise if
you switch it off, the software will not be
able to execute the task.
Well that is all about the Rank Tracker main
settings.
I hope this overview was helpful to you.
If you have any questions about our products
or Rank Tracker in particular, if you’d
like to share with us your feedback, please
leave a comment under this video.
Also feel free to send us emails at support@linkassistant.com.
See you in the next video.
Goodbye!