How to check your site’s position in search

The position of a website in search results plays a key role in its performance. WEDEX will tell you how to find out your website’s position in search and how to improve it.

Why do you need to check your website’s position?

The position of a website in the search results directly affects the success of an online business. Hence the need to monitor your website’s position, which will help you understand what actions you should take in your further website development strategy:

• Problems with the SEO strategy. Position analysis allows you to understand how changes in content or SEO optimization affect the visibility of a website in search engines like Google.
• Competitor analysis. Not only do links to your pages appear in search results, but also to your competitors’ pages. Thus, a comparative analysis will help you understand the influence of competitors on your niche and help you find gaps in your own strategy.
• Monitoring changes in Google algorithms. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, so in order to ensure that your website consistently ranks high in the search engine, you should analyze these changes.
• Traffic analysis. Position monitoring will provide information about the current state of traffic and possible problems.

What influences the position of a website?

The position of a website is influenced by more than 200 different factors that can affect its ranking in a search engine in one way or another. There are more important factors among them, and some of this huge list is known only to the developers of Google and other search engines. Let’s take a look at the main factors that have a great influence on the ranking of a website and, consequently, on its position.

Content

Indeed, the key element around which any marketing strategy is built is the content or website content. Content includes all materials from the site, i.e. text and media. Google and other search engines mostly pay attention to websites whose content can be described as «useful» and «trustworthy».

In general, there are several main criteria of content quality that affect the position of a website in the search engine:

• Uniqueness – Google has always been picky about outright plagiarism, but now identifying unique pages is very important for website promotion.
• Content expertise – the search engine gives preference to pages and sites whose content is backed up by statistical data and real research.
• Relevance – the content published on the website should be up-to-date. You should avoid using outdated information that is no longer true.
• Structure – any page on the website should have a clear and understandable structure. This is especially true for large text articles.
• Relevance to the topic – for Google to understand that your article or website page is really useful, you need to do at least basic SEO optimization of the text, fill the text with keywords. If the text has one headline and talks about something else, then such a page is likely to lose its search position.

SEO optimization

SEO optimization is a separate topic in itself. Let’s pay your attention to the main components of SEO elements that should be present on the site for a better website ranking.

Meta tags

Meta tags are code elements that help search engines understand what a website page is about. They include title and description. Both the title and the description must be optimized, i.e. have a specific length and contain keywords. This way, Google will be able to better identify the page and offer it to a potential user.

Site structure

Website structure can also be referred to as SEO optimization, because the user experience is also taken into account by the Google search engine. To improve your website’s search rankings, its internal content should be logical and understandable to any user. If you find out that some pages are ranked worse than others, it is likely that they have problems with either SEO or structure.

Internal and external links

For a search engine, it is important to have internal and external links to a website. First, internal links are an important element of building the internal structure. Such links should lead the user to other pages of the same site and encourage him to take action.

External links, for example, are more important in the context of a global promotion strategy. The presence of such links on other resources raises the authority of the site for Google, and therefore improves the site’s position. In both cases, the links should be «natural».

How to check the position of a website in search results?

There are several ways to find out the current position of a website in search engine results. The easiest and most affordable is to use the incognito mode or a private window. To do this, just open the appropriate mode in your browser settings.

There are a lot of online tools for deeper study and analysis of search positions, which we will talk about now.

Free position checking tools

In addition to the banal incognito search, there are a number of free online tools. One of the most effective tools is Google Search Console. Thanks to this platform, you can:

• analyze the site’s position by key queries;
• check the frequency of the site’s appearance in search results;
• find out which queries generate the most clicks;
• identify problems with page indexing.

The online service Google Search Console is completely free and offers accurate data directly from Google.

Keyword Rank Checker

Keyword Rank Checker is an online tool for analyzing the search ranking of a website based on the keyword you enter. The service is owned by Ahrefs, but it is completely free. To use it, you just need to enter the required word or phrase, the page address, and select the country.

The tool will show you a ranking check report that also contains information about the number of links, approximate traffic figures, and the top ten search results.

Freeware and paid position checking tools

In addition to free tools, there are a lot of shareware and paid online services for determining search rankings. Here are some of them.

Serpstat

Serpstat provides an extensive toolkit for advanced analysis of search rankings and website positions.

The platform’s functionality is available in a limited form for free, while detailed infographics will require a monthly subscription. Serpstat offers:

• monitoring the search position of a website by an unlimited number of keywords;
• determining the position and changing the ranking position in various search engines;
• analysis of current and past positions in the rating;
• compare changes in positions with competitors.

SEMRUSH

SEMRUSH is one of the most popular online services for analyzing and auditing SEO strategies, including search rankings. The free trial is valid for 7 days, then you need to subscribe.

SEMRUSH offers a large number of features that will be useful to any SEO specialist in particular:

• determining search positions by keywords;
• tracking the ranking of paid ads;
• analysis of existing contextual advertising;
• competitor analysis.

Sitechecker

Sitechecker has fewer features and is more focused on search rankings.

The online service offers the following advantages over competitors:

• visual graphs of the history of rating positions;
• identify positions by region or type of user device;
• the ability to track the dynamics of an unlimited number of projects;
• export search results in various tabular formats.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a useful online service that provides a wide range of functionality for checking the position of a website in the search rankings.

Service features:

• monitoring positions in more than 25 search engines;
• comparative tables and graphs of competitors’ ratings;
• filtering and segmentation of search results by various criteria;
• export of results.

Wincher

Wincher is an online SEO analysis service from Serpstat Labs. Wincher is consistently ranked among the best SEO tools.

As with other services, Wincher offers a free trial period, and then three plan options are available – for 49, 89, and 319 euros per month. Each of these plans has its own limitations and usage features. Wincher offers the following features:

• determining the position of the site by keywords;
• deep filter customization – by region, device, language, etc;
• Clustering queries (as a semantic kernel).

Each of the above tools has its own specific features, advantages, and disadvantages. Free online services may be enough for the first stages, but for a deeper analysis, paid tools are better suited.

What should you pay attention to to improve your website’s position in search results?

If, after checking through an online service, it turns out that there are some problems with your website and the search ranking position does not correspond to the desired results, you should check the following aspects.

SEO and meta tags

Problems often arise due to incorrectly filled meta tags. You need to have not only unique tags and descriptions for each page, but also accurate tags and descriptions. To maximize the effectiveness of meta tags, it is important to use data from the semantic core.

Compliance of content with search engine requirements

As we found out, Google has specific requirements for content. To improve your search rankings, you should create content that is targeted to your target audience. Moreover, it should not only be targeted, but also answer users’ questions, i.e. solve the audience’s «pain».

Adaptability, loading speed, design

All three points in the title are part of SEO, although they are not often mentioned. Since more than half of Google’s traffic comes from smartphones, a modern website must have a responsive layout. This is also one of the requirements for a high search engine ranking.

Page load speed is another point that is often forgotten. This indicator depends on the size of the media data on the page. If your site has a lot of large images, you should reduce their size. Pages that take a long time to load are not of interest to users, and therefore rarely have good search rankings.

The design should also encourage users to spend more time on the site, not vice versa. The interface and design should be pleasing to the eye, and the user should not have any questions about which button to press to change the interface language or buy a product.

Regular checks of the search position

Don’t forget to check your website’s rankings regularly. This way, you will be able to respond more efficiently and accurately to any changes and apply different promotion strategies in advance.

Conclusions.

In order for a website to be successfully ranked by search engines and have a consistently high position in the rankings, it is necessary to check these positions equally consistently and implement new promotion strategies. The checking services listed above should become a permanent tool for checking the position, but the choice should be made based on the needs of the business. Google Search Console is likely to be more suitable for a small company than Wincher.

Oleksandr Romanenko

Team Lead/Senior SEO specialist

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