If you have been tirelessly working on your website or a client’s site, it’s vital that you know where the site ranks in the search results.

Besides tracking the progress of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, knowing how your website ranks also helps you know whether your strategies are working.

Of course, if your rankings are improving, you should keep doing what you are doing. But if things aren’t getting better or are getting worse, you need to adjust your strategies.

How to check where my website is ranked on Google?

Checking the position of your website can be as simple as Googling your target keyword and seeing its position in the search results.

While doing this seems simple, it’s time-consuming as you have to insert one keyword at a time in the search bar. You also don’t get many insights into your page’s rankings. For example, you can’t tell compare the previous and current positions and see the data in real-time.

To get more details about your target keyword, you need to use a more advanced keyword tracking tool such as 360Ranker.

This tool is specially designed to check the rankings of different keywords. It will help you easily determine your website’s SEO ranking and help you locate high-traffic keywords that will propel your keywords to the top of Google’s SERP results.

To tell how your website is doing, you need to enter a URL in the search box and click “View Google Rankings.” The tool will crawl the internet and find out how your website is doing on the search results and provide you with a comprehensive report

The report includes all the tracked keywords, and from it, you will tell the ranking of each of your tracked keyword, the search volume, traffic that every keyword brings, and whether the keyword is going up or down.

To tell whether your SEO efforts are paying off, check how your keywords compare to the previous report. Our tool will notify you when the ranking of a keyword changes and from the dashboard you can tell whether it’s an increase or decrease from the previous position.

Always pay attention to the current and previous keyword positions to determine which keywords are effective for your long-term strategy and which should be replaced.

You can view the report from the SEO rank checker tools or export it as PDF or CSV for future use.

What to Do With the Results

Now that you have done your research and found the rankings of your website, you might be wondering what you should do with the results, right?

Well, there are plenty of things you can do.

Since you know how the different keywords are doing, you can adjust your SEO strategies based on the obtained data.

For example, if you have found that you are doing well on low-volume, low-competition keywords, you can double down on these and create plenty of content around the low-competition keywords.

Remember that you need to find more low-competition keywords related to your website and create high-quality content around them.

If some keywords are tanking, you can always work on the existing articles and improve them. We all know that Google loves new content, so by updating your content, you increase the chances of the rankings of your target keywords going up.

Why has my website ranking dropped?

One thing you can be sure of in SEO is that your rankings will always rise and drop. If you have found that your rankings have dropped, you shouldn’t panic, as this is a common occurrence.

In most cases, your rankings will drop when Google tunes its ranking algorithm. If this is the case, and you have been doing the right things, your rankings will slowly come back after the tuning.

The rankings can also drop when your rank-tracking software is acting up.

Before you do anything, check whether your rankings have truly tanked. Check your rank tracker’s website and ensure that everything is working as it should.

It’s always recommended that you track your main keywords with two trackers so that you can always confirm from the second application when you question the ranking on the main tracker.

If you have confirmed that the rankings have gone down and there is news of a Google update, you should give your website a week or two, and the rankings should return. If they don’t, you should find out why you were affected.

Some of the reasons your rankings might drop include the following:

Manual search engine penalty

A human reviewer imposes a manual action at Google, and they will do this when they feel that your site has many unnatural backlinks, user-generated spam, a lot of thin content, or the site has been hacked.

In most cases, when you have a manual action, your rankings will drop overnight for a substantial number of keywords.

The good thing is that you can tell whether your site has been manually penalized by visiting the Google Search Console.

Although Google won’t tell you the specific reason for the manual action, they will give you an idea of where to check. They will also let you know whether your entire site is affected or a few pages.

Google algorithm update

Google is constantly fine-tuning its algorithm, and your site might fall victim to the updates. If there has been news about a release of an update, you should research more about the update and find out what you need to do to recover from it.

As an SEO, there is no way you can avoid being affected by future algorithm update rollouts, but you can reduce the chances of being hit by staying on the good sides of Google.

This calls for you to avoid shady SEO hacks meant to manipulate rankings. For example, you shouldn’t build links without thinking much about their source—go for those from relevant sites and always keep your anchor text diverse. You should also regularly audit your link profile and eliminate any suspicions.

When it comes to content, always create high-quality content that is valuable to the readers. To prevent duplicate content, regularly run site crawls and eliminate duplicate titles, meta descriptions, and other content that can hurt your site.

Your competitors are getting better.

Sometimes your ranking’s drop will have nothing to do with updates—it might be because you are getting lazy while your competitors are improving.

When your competitors have upped their game, you won’t see drastic changes, but when you compare your ranking reports, you will notice a trend of you losing your positions over time.

The first thing you should do is to put a close eye on the competitor. If you have lost ranking on many keywords, your competitors have made site-wide enhancements.

To tell the areas they are strong on, run their website on a website auditor. From here, you will know whether they are building better content, having better technical optimization strategies, or building better backlinks.

If, on the other hand, you have lost just a few of your keyword positions, this is a sign that your competitor has optimized just a few pages on their website.

You should find the page that they are outranking you and compare it to yours. You should make the necessary changes to your site to surpass them in the search results.

You have lost valuable backlinks.

Backlinks serve as votes of confidence, so when they are no longer there, the search engines have the impression that you are no longer as valuable as you used to be.

You need to run your site through a backlink checker tool to tell the backlinks you might have lost. Once you find the lost backlink, contact the webmaster and notify them about the lost backlink.

To have your pulse on your backlinks, closely monitor them using a backlink tracker. This way, you will easily tell the number of backlinks you have which will come in handy when troubleshooting as you can tell whether the problem you are experiencing is due to bad backlinks.

You have made changes to the site.

Sometimes redesigning, changing the CMS, or moving your site to HTTPS can mess up your rankings.

If you recently made changes to your site and have noticed a drop in your rankings, you should visit your Google search console and find out if some errors and warnings coincide with when you made the changes.

Go through the errors and see the issues that might have come up due to the changes. Of course, you should dig deeper and find out how to fix the error.

There are changes in search intent and behavior.

Sometimes Google changes its idea of the intent of a search query, which significantly changes the websites that the search engine deems relevant to the query.

You need to put your target keyword in the search bar and analyze the type of content on the results pages. If the content is informational, find out whether you can tune the existing content on your website to match what is ranking or whether you have to create fresh content from scratch.

Remember that Google constantly changes goalposts, so you should closely monitor your keywords and ensure that they always meet the search intent. If they don’t, make the relevant changes.

Google Keyword Rank Checker Solution

As an SEO professional, you should always know how well your sites are ranking for your target keywords. As mentioned above, this not only helps you know where you stand but also helps you come up with strategies that help your website grow.

A keyword rank checker also helps you keep track of your competitors so they don’t blindside you and take your coveted high placements.

To save time and make your work easy, use a keyword tracker that reveals all the keywords on your website or web page and their placement in the search results.

From the tracker, you can see the following:

The keyword’s ranking position: Keyword positions increase and decrease over time, and using http://360ranker.com/, you can tell the position of each tracked keyword at any time.

Search volume: This is the frequency at which a keyword is searched for and the estimated total traffic that the keyword can bring to the site.

Keyword difficulty: This is how hard it is to rank for the keyword based on the competitors. A keyword with a high difficulty score will be more competitive than one with a lower difficulty.

From the tool you can see not only the current ranking but also the historical rankings. From the historical data, you can tell whether the rankings have improved or worsened over time.

If you are also tracking your competitor rankings, you can see how they progress and compare to you.

The report also helps you identify keyword cannibalization issues, such as multiple pages ranking for the same keyword.

Final thoughts
To reiterate, it’s vital that you know where your keywords are at any given moment. As mentioned, you can do this the manual way, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, or you can get an SEO rank tracker such as that requires you to enter the target keyword, and it will do the heavy lifting.

To tell the keyword’s position, you need to search your URL and see all the tracked keywords and their respective positions.

As much as it’s important to track your keywords, always play by the rules. This calls for you to always create high-quality content that benefits your readers.

Google is currently putting a lot of weight on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT). To stand a chance in the search results, you must ensure that Google trusts your website as a resource for quality, expert content.

You should work on publishing content that is thoroughly researched and adds value to the internet—don’t publish what has already been published thousands of.

Instead, spend your resources and time on independent studies that will bring new angles to your area of interest.