Checking whether your website ranks for a specific keyword is important if you’re using or planning to use an SEO strategy. It helps you keep track of your progress. So, how to see if your site ranks for a specific keyword?
Do You Know the Keyword?
Before you can check your website’s ranking, you need to choose the right keyword. If you’re already running a SEO campaign or use expert SEO services, then all your content will be centered around keywords, and you’ll have plenty of options.
On the other hand, if you’re just getting started with SEO, you probably don’t have any SEO content yet. In this case, you need to first identify the prevalent keywords on your web page before checking any rankings.
To do this, use an online keyword density analyzer and submit the URL of your web page to check for keywords. You’ll get an analysis of all the words on that page, which will enable you to determine the predominant keywords.
Checking Rank for a Specific Keyword
Once you know the keyword, you can go on to check the ranking. You can do this in several ways.
Manually
Do a Google search with the keywords in question and look for your website in the search results. This method is fairly reliable, but takes time, especially if your website is not ranked in the first few results pages.
Note that you should use an appropriate Google homepage, such as google.co.uk if your website has the .co.uk extension.
With Google Webmaster Tools
A much faster and more reliable method is by going to the Search queries section of Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll find there the keywords people searched for before ending up on your website.
Click on any keyword to discover the position of your website for that keyword in the search results. Alternatively, you may use Google Analytics.
With Keyword Position Finder
Finally, you can use a web tool to find the position of your website for a specific keyword, not only for Google, but also for Bing and for Yahoo. Enter the URL and type the keyword, and then choose to see where your keyword ranks among the top 1,000 search results for that keyword.
Note that this tool is not 100% reliable. Google has always been rather reluctant to allow third-parties to check website rankings.
Now that you have your answer to ‘how to see if my site ranks for a specific keyword?’ you should consider using expert SEO services to improve the quality of your content and ultimately strengthen your website’s position on the Web.