We all know the importance of finding those great keywords for our articles but do you know how to check your keyword ranking? Its not something to get hung up on but checking how your work is ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo is a good indication on the health of your website. Being able to monitor what your articles are doing, where they have got to.. are they going up or down.. indicates whether you are reaching your audience or not. Clearly if you have a new website, your keywords will take time to rank, so checking once a week is good enough at that stage.

Let’s look first at what you need to have in place to get good keyword rankings…

Pre-requisites For Good Ranking

  • Healthy Website – Good ranking for a website takes time, so the age of your website will have a bearing on how your keywords are ranking. The longer your website has been in action, the better your authority will be, your links, your presence.
  • SEO Good Practices – Search engine optimising on every article is a good plan. Have a check list of on-page SEO so you carry it out routinely on every article. Its a good routine to get into, knowing all your articles are optimised for ranking.
  • A Following – Ranking quickly for keywords is easier if you have a following to share your content with, either through your blogging or Facebook or email.

What Else Can You Do To Rank Well?

Many of us cannot afford to pay for clicks, to ‘pay’ for traffic to come to our sites, me included, so we rely on keywords to attract ‘organic’ traffic. It’s a slower process but at the start of a new website, its not probably not the time to be paying for traffic when there isn’t a lot of content so getting the keywords ranking is key to getting the process going. I won’t go into how to find the keywords here as I have already written an article on ‘How To Find Keywords For Your Business’, so follow the link to get that sorted out. Optimising your keywords is a great way to get ahead of the crowd, so don’t skimp on the process.

Once your content is published, and you have a website that is starting to get traffic, you can start checking how the keywords are ranking. You aren’t going to rank 100% of the time for every article you write, but its wise to see how your work is ranking. So how do you do this?

How To Check For Keyword Ranking.

So this can be easy or it can be time-consuming and frustrating. There are many free keyword checkers online that you can use to check out your keywords and there are also many that offer a free week for you to try it out first, which is always a good plan.

Many of these keyword checkers will rank your keywords in Google, Bing, and Yahoo so you get three hits all in one. Whilst Bing and Yahoo cover only around 1/10th of the total rankings on the web, it still equates to 10% of all internet users and as there are over 4,000,000,000 internet users in the world, 10% of that is still a huge number of users! We all know Google, Bing, Yahoo, there are others – Baidu ( Chinese Market) and DuckDuckGo that are increasing their position in the market.

The most straightforward way to check how your keywords are ranking is to use a keyword tool.. If you are serious about ranking, then you might want to consider, after you have tried a few keyword tools, to subscribe to one that you can then track your rankings month by month.

Tools For Keyword Ranking

Many of the keyword tools will offer you alternatives to your search so you can see how the alteration to one or two words can dramatically change the ranking of your keywords. They also will give you misspelt alternatives and keyword phrases that may not make absolute sense, but they’re ones that people are searching.

Jaaxy

I have one that I use which you can try for free for 30 searches. Its called Jaaxy and I have written a review on it so go check that out and follow the links to the free trial, or you can click on the link to the right of this blog to go straight over to Jaaxy to try it out, bu the review does explain how it works, so you will get more from the 30 free searches if you know what each facet of the platform is about. I pay for the pro version on a monthly rate, which is very reasonable. I am also a member of Wealthy Affiliate – a platform that supports entrepreneurs, and as such they offer me a discount. You can do this too if you want.

Rank Tracker

I haven’t tried out Rank Tracker but it offers a free keyword tool. It is limited but for a startup, it offers quite enough to get going and once you are moving forward with your site, you can decide whether to upgrade.

Rank Tracker has similar different keyword tools as Jaaxy, including suggestions from Google, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon and it integrates with Google keyword planner if you want to start and adword campaign and Google search console.

Your best SEO keywords are often not the most obvious ones. To find real keyword gems, you need to dig out all the possible variations from multiple data sources. As you can see from the image above, you are limited with the free version but it does allow you unlimited keyword searches, and the ability to see how your keywords would rank.

Answer The Public

This is a rather characterful display of keywords… with tons of choice.. Its entertaining in how they have displayed the information for sure !

They have designed this from a different angle, in that when you search you aren’t actually searching for one word but for a string of words – a keyword phrase. Its not unique in this as the other keyword search tools does that but they don’t present them in this way.

I don’t think they do it any better than any of the others but it shows you the threads in a very intuitive format, so you can quickly find the things that people are searching for, and as we know, when asking a question, Google and other search engines, like questions, they are closer to natural language and may well get better ranked.

You can search by letter, so a kind of ‘alphabet soup’ style search. This is a free keyword search tool so something I will use !

Keywords Everywhere

This a really cute keyword search tool.. Completely free which is awesome ! So its an extension that you add to your browser, that as you search on Google, it comes up with various metrics relating to the keywords you are searching for, once you’re done, a box of similar keywords comes up at the side!

You can see the little words and numbers below the google search box. I was looking for Wealthy Affiliate Review just for an example, then to the right a whole host of relate keywords… awesome tool… I will be using this one too.

Sum Up

There are lots more keyword tools out there, but the drawback is that you only get a limited trial of say a week or two weeks, then you have to sign up. The thinking behind this is that by that time you have got so use to the tool that you cannot manage without it. Try out the free ones first, always the best thing with a start up website, don’t outlay any money on your site until you are far enough along that you need more metrics. Try out Jaaxy … I’m biased because this is the keyword tool of choice for me.

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