Automatically track search engine rankings with Rank Tracker

How-to: Set up your target SEs. Run Rank Tracker and open your project. Go to Preferences -> Preferred Search Engines and select your target search engines from the list of over 570 supported ones.

How-to: Set up the location in search engines' settings. In Preferences > Preferred Search Engines, hit the Add Custom button next to one of the search engines you target. You'll see an advanced settings window, offering you to set up a number of language and location settings. Type in your target location in the Preferred Location field (feel free to enter a state, town, or even an exact street address). Click Apply to see your location displayed on the map and hit OK to save the localized search engine you've just created.

Repeat if you're targeting several locations.

Back in your Rank Tracker workspace, you'll need to add respective columns for the custom, geo-specific versions of search engines you just selected. To do that, right-click the header of any column, select the columns you need to add from Available columns on the left, and double-click each one to move it to Visible columns.

How-to: Assign your keywords to landing pages. In Rank Tracker, select the keyword(s) you're optimizing a certain page for, right-click the selection, and hit Assign selected keyword(s) to landing page.

Whenever the wrong page comes up in the search results, you'll see a warning sign along with the page's URL in your Rank Tracker workspace.

Tip: See if any of your pages rank for your keywords already. If one of your site's pages ranks for a given keyword already, it may be a good idea to work on that page's content instead of trying to get a brand new page to rank. After you run a ranking check in Rank Tracker, see if any of your pages are ranking already for some terms — and keep on optimizing those to take them to the top.

How-to: Enable recording of SERP history. Go to Preferences > Rank Checking Mode in Rank Tracker and make sure that the Track organic results only box is unchecked, and the Track multiple results for keyword box is checked. Once you've done this, SERP features will be tracked along with the regular organic results every time you check rankings.

Whenever your site is found within any of SERP features as you check your rankings, you will see an icon of the SERP feature your site was found in (if any). The three dots you can see in the same column mean that your site was found in the SERP more than once. You can click them to see all the results.

Plus, you have the SERP Features column (that you can add by right-clicking any column's header) where you can see all SERP features present on the page; the green ones are those your site ranks in.

How-to: Specify your competitors' URLs. Go to Preferences > Competitors in Rank Tracker, press to add a competitor, and fill in the competitor's details.

In your Rank Tracker workspace, you'll be able to include or exclude competitors' data from the tables and graphs by simply clicking Show Competitors.

How-to: Set up the rank checking mode. Go to Preferences > Rank Checking Mode and specify whether or not you'd like to track multiple results per keyword. Here, you can also set the number of results you need checked.

Tip: Adjust the search safety settings. As you probably know, search engines can be sensitive to automated requests, throwing in CAPTCHAs and occasionally even blocking IPs to prevent their servers from overload with queries sent by robots. In Preferences > Search Safety Settings in Rank Tracker, you'll find a number of prefs that will help you stay search engine-friendly and keep your IP undetected as you check your ranks. If you check rankings regularly for a project with up to 100 keywords, we recommend using the following combo of settings.

• In Preferences > Misc Global Settings, reduce the number of simultaneous tasks to 3 or 4.
• In Preferences > Search Safety Settings > Human Emulation, check the first two boxes.
• In Preferences > Search Safety Settings > CAPTCHA Settings, check the Show CAPTCHA for ranking checks in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. box.

For bigger projects and more frequent ranking checks, you may want to consider using an anti-CAPTCHA key in Preferences > Search Safety Settings > CAPTCHA Settings and/or a list of reliable private proxies in Preferences > Search Safety Settings > Proxy Rotation.

How-to: Check 'em! In your Rank Tracker workspace, click to update your site's positions in your target search engines. Once you've checked your positions more than once, you'll see a Difference value calculated to reflect your ranking progress.

You'll also see your progress graph changing (hopefully upwards) over time to give your ranking growth a visual form.

Tips: 1. Set a date for comparison. Click to select which results you want your current ranks to be compared against — or even set a custom date for comparison.

2. Schedule your ranking checks. Rank Tracker gives you an option of automating your ranking checks so that you don't have to run them manually each time. To set scheduled check-ups, go to Preferences > Scheduler and Alerts, and click to create a new scheduled task.

Go through the steps, selecting the type of the task, the projects it will run for, and the task's time and regularity.