Ranking/Average Position for Priority KWs
Keywords, the lifeblood of Organic Search performance. Without target/priority keywords a site’s page may not be visible to the right audience at the right time. Hence why it is crucial to create a strong priority keyword strategy and track the performance of that strategy.
After developing your keyword strategy through keyword research and mapping, but prior to implementing on-page, you want to understand your baseline performance.
To set a baseline for tracking performance you can utilize the performance reports from your site’s Google Search Console data (or other 3rd party tools such as AHREFs and SEMRush). Begin by pulling a report of the keywords that generate traffic to your site’s pages. This can be found in GSC’s Performance Report by filtering through pages and populating keyword data from the queries tab. An export of this data will give you clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position for each keyword to the segmented page; you can then compile your lists into one spreadsheet for ease.
Once you have your baseline of the ranking position, or average position, of a priority keyword to a given page you can implement your on-page optimizations utilizing the priority keywords and begint tracking their performance.
The goal is to constantly increase the average position or ranking of a keyword over time to increase the visibility of your site in the SERPs for that keyword. Keep in mind that the ranking position of a keyword is constantly fluctuating depending on Google’s algorithm. This is why Google Search Console reports on the “Average position” which will give you the average ranking of that keyword over a given time period.
Given that a keyword’s ranking position is constantly fluctuating it is recommended to track the position on a bi-weekly or monthly basis for a full understanding of the average position. For on-going tracking of the rank repeat the steps taken to create the baseline report and measure the current position against the baseline report.