One of the phrases a digital marketer lives by is “If you can track it, you can improve it.” When it comes to SEO and keyword tracking, you should be constantly updating and looking for room to improve. SEO and keywords are what drives traffic to your site, so why wouldn’t you want to keep them as up-to-date as possible?

Because Google determines what ranks and what doesn’t, paying attention to Google algorithms, which change around 500-600 times per year, is only half the battle.

Why Should I Use SEO and Keyword Tracking?

The question you should really be asking is why are you NOT using SEO and keyword tracking? Here’s a fun fact – tracking your SEO and keywords allows you to monitor performance to see what’s working and what’s not. SEO and Keyword tracking will also show you the rank of your website, webpages, and landing pages for specific keywords. (This is extremely important, especially for small businesses who are trying to make a name for themselves)

An important component to keyword and SEO tracking is that it will show you if your keywords are positioned to make it onto the first search engine results page, or SERP. These tools can also show you how your keywords have ranked over time, allowing you to see if they are still relevant to people that are searching online. (Keynote trends are constantly changing, as a business you must know your market trends and what keywords you consumers are using to find you.)

What can I use SEO and Keyword Tracking For?

Maybe you were just skimming and don’t have a chance to read what we have above. Don’t you worry – we got you covered! As we said before, keywords exist to help you rank. Keyword tracking tools can be used in a number of ways including:

SEO Rankings Falling?

Have your organic clicks or traffic numbers decreased? A good place to start to find out why would be to look at your SEO and keywords. (Which is why you should keep track of your keywords!) Keeping track of keyword ranks can help you determine which keywords are performing poorly so that you can optimize your keyword selection.

If you have different pages ranking for different keywords, you can keep track of all of them easily.

Evaluating Competitors

Many SEO and keyword tracking tools allow you to “spy” on your competitors to see if they are using or ranking from the same keywords as you. If you notice the same competitor is outranking you in every keyword you are using, it may be time to reevaluate your SEO strategy.

Some tracking tools will give you the option to get alerts or reports when competitors change up their keywords. I personally, use SPYFU and Report Garden to track keywords as shown above.

Monitoring Location-Specific Keywords

If your business is serving multiple locations, you want to make sure you are ranking everywhere that your customer is. Monitoring keywords by location can allow you to see how competitive keywords are to plan your SEO strategy. This can also help you attract new clients in those areas.

Features, features, features

Exclusive features vary by tracking tool. However, most tracking tools have awesome features that will make SEO and keyword tracking easy peasy. (We all love easy 😉 ) Some features include:

• Mobile ranking – Find out how your keywords rank on mobile SERPs.
• Graphs – See how keywords have changed over time by individual keyword, groups, keyword groups, or all of your keywords.
• SERP Ranks – Get evidence for where exactly your page is ranking for specific keywords or keyword groups.
• Reporting – Make awesome, automatically generated reports for your and your clients

What is Report Garden?

Report Garden is reporting software that aims to assist digital marketing agencies in reporting, analysing, and analytics. With Report Garden, reports are done quickly, are visually appealing, and easy to understand.

Report Garden can help with monitoring, tracking, reporting, project management, and CRM. At Momentum we use Report Garden as our reporting software and couldn’t be more pleased with their services!

How Do You Set Up SEO & Keyword Reporting in Report Garden?

Drum roll, please. Now, what you’ve all been waiting for – here is how you setup SEO and Keyword reporting in Report Garden.

Click “New Domain” to begin

From here, you will set up which website you want to track.

First, type in the name of the site, whether it be your main website, a web page, or a landing page, that you want to analyze.

Next, copy and paste the URL for the website. If you already have this website setup under a Client category, select the corresponding Client Name from the dropdown menu.

Then, select which analysis you want to track. This can either be organic search, onsite analysis, or backlink analysis. Select whichever best fits your reporting goals.

When finished, click “Next” to move onto keyword selection.

Select your keywords

In this tab, you can select the keywords you want to analyze. You can either type them directly into the “keywords” box or copy and paste from a keyword list you already have.

After your keywords are inserted, select which search engine results you want to see. Your options here are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or Baidu. Next, select the country you want to analyze and the city. You can even break down the city location even further by inserting a specific zip code.

Lastly, you can choose if you want results for desktop SERPs or mobile SERPs.

Track competitors

Once everything is selected, Report Garden gives you the option to track your competitors. Here, all you need is to type in your competitor’s name and insert the URL that you want to compare to yours.

Get Your SEO & Keyword Results

Once you receive your report, you will be brought to an overview page. Here, you can break down the analytics and view the results by daily, weekly, or monthly. You can even set up a custom timeline for the reporting – this can be helpful if you want to monitor the success of a landing page during a specific campaign timespan. (This is amazing for lead gen)

Next, you will see your organic keyword report. This will show you…

• The keyword
• The keyword’s position
• The page rank of the keyword + the URL you provided
• Local rank
• Rating
• Group
• SERP link
• Total Number of Results

After seeing the keyword report, you can then select “Groups” to group keywords together and evaluate their performance as a group.

Lastly, there is a tab to analyze the competitor comparison. For this, you may need to provide Report Garden with some additional information to get an in depth analysis.

Set Up Your Report

Next, you will want to bring your keyword tracking over into a full report to get the bigger picture. Here, you will go to the reporting tab on the left-hand side. Here, you can select to create a new report or search for a report you have already created. You can also customize your reports by adding customer logos, colors, and so on.

Once you access your report, you can pull in things from the SEO and keyword tracking report such as:

• Average keyword position
• Current page rank
• Previous page rank
• Previous keyword position
• Weekly position

If you wanted to results to be more visual, you can create a bar chart comparing your SEO and keyword tracking ranks or your ranks against your competitors.

From here, you can download it to share with your team or with your clients. You can even set it up to automatically update and send out the Report Garden reports. This is a feature we highly recommend here at Momentum and utilize frequently!

That’s it from us! We hope you learned something useful that you can use for your business’ day-to-day.

Have you ever used Report Garden for reporting or SEO and keyword tracking? What do you like most about it?