How to Check Your Blog’s Ranking on Google
You’ve been working hard on your blog, posting articles each month that are helpful and relevant to your target audience. Now you’d like to see if this hard work is actually paying off and have the big question on your mind.
How close are your articles to ranking on Google and sending traffic to your website?
In today’s article, we are going to break down the steps for you so that you can start tracking your success each month as a blogger.
Step 1: Sign Up for a FREE Google Webmaster Tools Account
In order to see how you’re doing, you are going to need to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools which is now known more formally as Google Search Console.
Here is a quick tutorial showing you how to sign up for your free account.
Step 2: Add Your Website & Verify It
Next, you’ll need to add your website domain to your account and then verify it by linking your Google Search Console account with your Google Analytics account. You can also copy paste a ‘meta tag’ into your header if you understand code. They’ll give you the code to copy and you’ll have to access your code editor and scroll to the header section to paste it in.
It’s much easier though to just confirm your website by going the Google Analytics route.
Step 3: Click “Search Analytics”
Go into your dashboard and find where it says “Search Traffic”
Click it so that it drops down a menu of pages and look for the first one that says “Search Analytics”
It will open up a page that looks like this…
As you can see it says “Search Analytics” and then underneath it is a sentence that states “Analyze your performance on Google Search.
Winner Winner! You’ve made it to the page where you can monitor your blog’s ranking in the Google search engine.
You can adjust the filter by queries, pages, etc. Start with queries to see what terms people searched that led to them finding your website.
Step 4: Determine Your Filters
To get the full view of your blog’s search engine ranking performance, you can check all 4 of the filter boxes. It will add additional stats to the chart and you’ll see a new chart that looks like this…
What Does Each Metric Mean?
Clicks – How many people clicked your website from the Google search results. The higher this number is the better as it means lots of people are visiting your website each month which is exactly what you want.
Impressions – How many times your website was seen in the search results but not necessarily clicked. For example, someone could type in Paleo Diet, and your website could come up 3rd in the search results but the person doing the Google search might click on the website that ranks first in the search results. Your website was seen in the search results, therefore it counts as an impression. Now if your website ranked 45th for the term Paleo Diet, then this person would have never seen your website in the search results and it wouldn’t be counted as an impression unless they went and visited the 5th page of search results where your website would have been ranked 5th on the page. Every page shows only 10 results so 45 means the 5th result on the 5th page of Google results. 18th place would be the second page of Google search results. Make sense?
Avg. CTR – the percentage of time your website shows up in the search results page and is actually clicked. If you show up 100 times and only get 10 clicks, then your websites Avg. CTR would be 10%. Usually the higher you rank, the higher your CTR will be because people don’t usually click results 8, 9, and 10. They look at the top few results and if they don’t see article title related to their problem, then they will refine their search further and populate new results.
Avg. Position – the average ranking your blog shows up in Google. Each page and post you publish gets indexed by Google and will show up in their search results, whether it’s 1st or 56th. By improving your on page SEO, you’ll start seeing your articles and webpages ranking higher for the terms they are targeting.
Then scroll down below the chart and you’ll see the Queries that people were searching Google and what position your website came up for those searches.
Here is an example of one of my websites. I’ve blocked out the queries to hide what keywords I’m ranking highly for and getting the bulk of my monthly traffic from.
You’ll notice that the terms I rank 1 or 2 for have a much higher CTR (click through rate) than the terms I’m ranking 6th, 7th, and 8th for.
There’s a statistic that was discovered by Neil Patel I believe that was something like 50% of traffic clicks the first 3 search results. So it’s important to be highly ranked if you want to capture the bulk of the traffic for the search term you’re trying to rank on Google for.
Here’s a example chart of traffic by keyword ranking:
You can decide how you want to filter your results by the following:
- Queries
- Pages
- Countries
- Devices
- Search Type
- Date Ranges
In order to monitor it each month, set a custom date range so that it shows only the results for that month. Do this month by month and logged the results in an excel spreadsheet so you can easily compare months and see how you’ve improved.
It also allows you to download your results in an excel CSV file which can save you time from manually copying down your results.
So to answer your question today…
How do I see how well my blog is ranking in Google search results?
- Create a Google Search Console account
- Verify your website so Google can start tracking data for it
- After a month of being verified, login to your account dashboard and check your search engine positions for different articles and pages on your website
- Click “Search Analytics”
- Select the filters you want (I recommend all 4)
- Look at what terms people searched in Google and what position your website came up for those terms
- Edit your article to further improve its “on-page SEO”
- Monitor your article positions each month and make tweaks so they improve over time and you can rank top 3
How to Get Visitors to Your Website
Once you’ve set up your WordPress website, the next step will be getting traffic to it. You can go the slow route and try to rank your website in Google using SEO. You can take the expensive route which includes buying Facebook ads.
Or you can take the best route which is using Pinterest to drive FREE traffic to your website.
If you want to learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website to quickly grow your audience, double your email list size, and make a living online then make sure you check out my course, Profitable Pinterest Traffic.
It comes with worksheets, checklists, and lots of training videos to help you set up your Pinterest profile and drive traffic back to a website page or email landing page. Discover the strategies to rank your pins higher in the search feed so they get found by Pinterest users. Save yourself time and money using my system.
Get started driving traffic to your website
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