If you think starting a website is all you need to go digital with your business, you’re wrong. The world wide web is a digital jungle, and survival of the fittest means ensuring your website comes at the top of every relevant search engine result. Knowing how to check your website rank, and updating your website to keep it near the top of those rankings, is key for online success.
How do you check your website rank?
Ranking for target keywords brings likely customers to your website.
For example, a florist whose website ranks for the keywords “buy flowers near me” will capture more customers than a florist whose website appears on Page #2 of search rankings for “buy flowers near me.”
So, do you know how to check your website rank?
Manual vs. automatic analytic tools
Let’s take a look at two ways you can check your website rank below.
- Manually: This process includes keying queries into search engines
- Using analytical tools: There are many tools that will research online queries for you automatically
If you decide to manually check your website rank, know that this can be a time-consuming project and sometimes take you to inaccurate conclusions.
It makes more sense to use available online tools that check your website rank automatically.
These tracking tools help filter through search engine result pages (SERPs) to alert you when you’re getting off track. They also notify you whenever you have a drop in ranking so you can remedy the loss.
3 analytic tools worth considering
Looking for a Google rank checker? Many analytic tools offer free trials to let you see if it's a right fit before diving into a paid plan. Some well-known online rank-checkers include:
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs has a database of 500 million keywords and lets you map things like:
- Target keywords
- Ranking position
- Estimated organic traffic
It even keeps a check on competitor rankings (more on this later).
2. SEMrush
Many digital marketers prefer this SEO (search engine optimization) toolkit for keyword research. Key features include:
- Position tracking
- Google site links
- Knowledge panel
It’s a great tool for helping you tweak keywords to land you a spot within the top 10, 20, or 100 searches.
3. SERPWatcher
SERPWatcher by Mangools has easy-to-use features that include:
- Rankings checker
- Link miner
- Keyword finder
- Location-wise website performance tracker
It gives you a detailed report of your website’s overall performance, along with each keyword’s ranking and any change in positions.
Honorable mention: If your site is built on WordPress, MonsterInsights is a great analytics plugin that can help give you insights you need to win at SEO.
Key tips for landing a Page #1 ranking
Whether your site is new or has been around for a long time, you’ll want to get the basics right.
Getting people to visit your site and boosting organic website traffic are essential for higher rankings.
Google and other search engines look at over 200 factors in ranking each website. Supposing your business is Google-focused for driving traffic and revenue, your SEO plan must be aligned to their algorithm.
For Google ranking, some of the prime factors Google looks for are:
- Domain authority and domain age: This refers to how long you’ve owned and used the domain name (longer is better).
- Page loading time: Ensure your page speed and loading times are fast for users (preferably under two seconds).
- Activity/publishing frequency: This needs to be consistent and posted during the times your target market is online most.
- Content authenticity: Ensure grammar, spelling errors, and reader relevance are set to the highest of standards.
- Website’s utility for browsers: Whether your website can easily be viewed on any browser (as well as on mobile devices) is an important part of Google’s ranking process.
The above is only a list of the most basic factors of interest to search algorithms. Understanding how these algorithms function is critical for developing a data-driven strategy to improve your website’s ranking.
1. Choose a reputed website builder
These days, web builders offer many built-in automated features to improve SEO. Some of their key functions include options that make your website mobile-friendly as well.
Check to see if your site builder includes features such as:
- Automatic sitemap and heatmap creation: Sitemaps make it easier for Google to crawl or read your site, while heatmaps show you how people interact with specific web pages across your website.
- Mobile-friendly design options: In 2021 alone, mobile devices (not including tablets) accounted for 51.98% page views globally. If your website cannot easily be viewed on a mobile device, you must remedy this.
- SSL certificates: These enable data encryption on your website and are an essential feature to have for website security. This is especially true since privacy laws are gaining more momentum worldwide.
Editor's note: GoDaddy’s Website Builder helps take care of all the above and more with it’s easy-to-use SEO and marketing tools. Start for free today!
2. Go for a good web host
A good SEO ranking depends on how quickly your site pages load to a large extent. Imagine you are trying to check out a site and it takes ages to load! Viewers have zero tolerance for slow websites.
Speed is such a crucial part of the browsing experience that 47% of consumers expect a website to take no more than two seconds to load.
Converted to dollars, a slow website could lead to a significant financial loss for your business over time.
For example, if an e-commerce site makes $100,000 per day, a one-second page delay could cost the business $2.5 million worth of sales loss annually.
That’s why choosing a good host is crucial. They control how quickly your website loads, which ultimately affects your online business.
Related: What’s the right web hosting plan for me?
3. Develop a rocking SEO strategy
SEO is all about how you structure your website and make it easy for both search engines and people to understand.
Regular keyword trawling will keep you updated with what the world is searching for at this moment (Google Trends is a good place to start). Do this often to help you align your content with consumer behavior. You’ll also want to follow consistent on-page and off-page SEO practices to stay relevant.
Along with populating your website with highly relevant keywords for search engines, it’s also important to help Google to better recognize natural human language.
To do this, you’ll need to consider Google’s algorithm called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (or BERT for short). Optimizing for BERT simply means that you’ll want to write in a way that caters to your audience and not for bots.
Editor’s note: Need help choosing and adding keywords to your website? GoDaddy’s automated search engine optimization tool is the quick way to make the needed adjustments. Move your website up in search rankings to capture more customers!
4. Enlist help from other online resources
There are plenty of online resources to help you learn how to optimize your website. Moz, SEMRrush and Google are all reliable sources of information.
5. Keep track of competitor’s rankings
There is much to be learned from seeing how your competitors are doing on Google.
When looking at competitor rankings, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
- What are they currently posting?
- What value additions are they offering to make their browsing experience more efficient? For example, chat, guest checkout, quicker page loads, etc.
- Which keywords are they using?
Keep track of all this and use it to improve your own site’s overall ranking.
Why is it important to check your website rank?
Online reader and buyer behavior analysis shows that most people click on one of the first three links on search engines when deciding which one to read or what to buy.
You can check your website rank by using one of the tools listed above.
If your website appears within the first three links (below the Ads), congratulations! This is the sweet spot.
However, ranking on Page #2 of search engine results won’t get your business much attention.
Additionally, if you own an e-commerce store, knowing how to check your website rank is the key to catching the attention of the estimated 780 million internet users in India.
Ensuring each page of your website contains keywords that relate to what’s on the page helps push your page to the top of search engine results.
You’ll be glad you made the effort
Other key reasons to prioritize your search engine rankings, include:
- Visibility: Being easy to find on the internet brings you maximum online visibility, which equals more sales.
- Attracts new visitors: Top-ranking positions help you reach out and show your business to new customers.
- Raises brand awareness: People are more likely to familiarize themselves with your brand by seeing your page in the top 10 of various search results.
- Improves authenticity: Better ranking also makes way for business authenticity – it’s human psychology to automatically believe that anything at the top is the best.
Statistics show that the first three unpaid listings on any search results page get most of the clicks. In fact, 75% of users click on links listed on the Page #1 of search engine results, compared to only 25% on the Page #2.
To wrap up
Whether you have an online-only business or are maintaining a website to add value to your brick-and-mortar store, it pays to check your website rank. You can do your own SEO or hire a professional to make you more visible on the first page of search engines queries.
Remember, more clicks on your web pages equals more customers and more revenue for your business.
The main things to look for on a consistent basis are:
- Website rankings: Check them regularly and follow SEO best practices.
- Website visibility: Work on content authority and keyword optimization by maintaining keyword density.
- Website loading times: Get the basics right and choose a reputed web builder with a speedy host.
A top search engine ranking is the best digital business asset.
At the end of the day, high website traffic is that sweet spot between appeasing search engine metrics and making human beings happy.
It might take time and considerable effort to get there, but once you reach first page status, you’ve arrived in the digital marketing space.
