As you start to build out content on your website, it is important to have a good grasp of where your website is ranking and we’re particular pages and posts that you create on your website or ranking.
There are many ways that you can check your actual ranking, from manual searches (which is time-consuming), to leveraging automation software that will show you exactly where you are ranked and in some cases, track your rankings over longer periods of time.
I am going to be walking you through the process of how to check your website rankings in Google, as well as the other “top” search engines Bing & Yahoo. If you can comprehend this, and you spend some time tracking your rankings, it is going to get ranked in search engines like Google, and ultimately you can construct a game plan to improve your rankings as you start to understand the results.
Google Ranking, How it Works.
So how exactly does Google work, and how to they determine why one website or article is deserving of a better rankings than another, very similar piece of content on another website.
There’re many variables in which Google looks for, in fact there are 1,000’s of contributing items that go towards their “search ranking algorithm”. These are also known as Google Ranking factors. When you learn how to build out your website in a way that is “search engine optimized”, rankings will come rather easily.
Because of this, I recommend that you learn how to properly optimize your websites and get proper training. I am not going to go into great detail about all the ranking metrics, but in essence it comes down to the content you’re creating, the quality of content, your user design, the speed of your website, the engagement you get within it, and through time, the overall authority and reputation in the USA hasn’t Google.
Why it is So Important to Rank?
Rankings lead to traffic. It is that simple. The reason you want to rank in Google is that it is going to allow you to capture relevant search traffic, that will then come to your website, and ultimately represents a great deal of opportunity.
No different from the off-line world, where you are trying to get customers to walk by storefront, this is equivalent to that. The more ranking you have under more keywords, will equate to more relevant traffic. There’re many affiliate/internet marketers and large corporations that drive the entirety of their online income through SEO in Google.
So rankings are your path to free, highly relevant traffic (other than your efforts to get ranked, time, content, etc), and your path to creating a long term and sustainable online business.
The State of the Current Search Engine Market Share
Google currently has close to a 84% market share in search, so this should be the focal point of your search marketing campaigns. Understanding where you are ranking in Google and WHY you are ranking where you are in Google will give you a good pulse on your search engine optimization activities.
Below is a chart outlining the North American search engine market share for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go (DDG).
This does not mean you should overlook Yahoo & Bing, which have a combined 14% of the search market. This may not sound like a lot, but this equates to billions of searches daily…and 100’s of billions of searches per year. Getting ranked in these search engines can lead to a significant amount of traffic and opportunity on your website, so it is critical that you understand where you are ranked under those as well.
Within SiteRank which I am going to be referring to in the next section, there is also a feature that will allow you to automatically track rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Where to Go to Quickly Check Your Rank
There’re a few ways that you can track your rankings in Google. Of course, There is a very manual way of doing. You can head over to Google.com (or your country specific version of Google), do a search, and then come up with.
Simple do a Google search, say I was looking to see if I was ranked under the term “dog training”, I would type this search into Google (as shown below).
Then you would scroll down the ranks, through the ads and the image results, to see if you are ranking. If are not on the first page of the rankings, you would then click to the next page and so on.
This is terribly inefficient though. There has to be a better way and there absolutely is.
I personally use Jaaxy SiteRank to check all of my rankings in Google, Bing & Yahoo as it does so efficiently (seconds) and automatically. It scans all the search engines and lets you know not just where you are ranked, but whether your rankings are going up and doing.
See below a sample search with SiteRank.
You can access SiteRank directly through WealthyAffiliate.com, even within a free Starter membership. If you don’t already have an account, I highly recommend that you get one here.
You will get access to not just this too, but an entire research platform and entrance to the most elite affiliate marketing training in the world (including full coaching). But if you just use it for SiteRank, that is up to you.
Tracking Your Rankings Over Time
As you start establishing your website online, you will want to keep a good eye on a wide array of your rankings, which one’s are going up, which are going down, and whether your website as a whole is improving or not.
Let’s look at an example here. This is a website I created a few years back that helps people avoid scams within the online world. It has pretty good authority and as you are going to see, the rankings in Google appears to be on an upward trend.
This is a good sign and on this basis, I am pretty happy with my websites performance. If I were to see a downward trend in my rankings, I would likely want to investigate why the rankings were going down.
There could be several factors that can drag rankings down, but some of the most common are lack of content creation (little consistency), lack of engagement within your actual content (comments), or you are trying to “Trick” Google into ranking you through operatives like back linking schemes or black hat techniques that always end up getting punished by Google.
That leads me to…
Keep Track of Your Rankings, Drastically Improve Your SEO
When you check where you are ranking in search engines, it is important that you understand how to use this information wisely. With Jaaxy SiteRank (Pro/Enterprise), you are going to be able to track your rankings over a certain period of time automatically.
This means that you can perform a keyword rank check and set it to either daily, twice per week, weekly, twice per month, or monthly. Obviously the more often you scan for rankings, the more specific and detailed your data will be in respect to 
fluctuations.
There are three cases that you will be presented with are either ranks going up, rankings going down, or ranks flat lining.
In the case of a brand new website, it may not be ranking at all and this is quite typically. If you are building out your website in a way that is properly crafted for SEO, then you will usually start to see some real break through in search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) within the first 3 months and it can continue to move in an upward trend from there.
Understanding and have access to ranking data can truly help you understand which of your SEO activities had lead to traffic to great rankings, which one’s have hurt rankings, and which one’s may have had little to no bearing on your rankings. Jaaxy Siterank (a research platform within Wealthy Affiliate) is an excellent platform for helping offer you this bird eye view.
If you have any questions about how to track your rankings, Jaaxy SiteRank, or how to interpret your rankings going up or doing, I would be happy to shed some light and insight into this based on my 16 years experience in the space.
