Analyzing your website’s keyword rankings helps you stay competitive and successful in today’s competitive online marketplace.

Since the majority of the web traffic is directed to the first page of search results, you need to identify which keywords can drive organic traffic to your website. Keyword rank tracking can help you do that.

You can choose a free rank tracker tool for your website and find out which keywords are driving the most amount of organic traffic to your site and optimize your content accordingly. However, you must steer clear of certain mistakes while analyzing your website’s keyword rankings.

7 Common Mistakes To Avoid During Keyword Research And Analytics

1. Ignoring long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords and longer and more relevant keywords that people use when actively searching for what you offer. If you are not considering such keywords while analyzing your website’s keyword rankings, you are missing out on some significant opportunities.

Long-tail keywords are more specific and tell you a lot more about the searcher’s intent. When compared to their respective short-tail keywords, a majority of the long-tail keywords are more accessible to rank for. You are more likely to rank on the first few pages of Google by targeting long-tail keywords.

2. Not tracking local SEO rankings

Tracking local SEO rankings while analyzing the keyword rankings of your website helps you attract more customers who are actively looking for what you offer. As you may already know, local SEO ranking is your website’s position in search engines for queries that have a location mentioned in them.

Tracking your local SEO rankings provides you insights into the website traffic from local searchers. Some of these details include the search volume from local searches, target keywords people are using to find your site, and the location of your website visitors.

3. Ignoring mobile vs. desktop ranking

Neglecting mobile device rankings is perhaps the silliest mistake you can make while analyzing your website keyword rankings. In 2023, more than half of all web traffic came from mobile devices. You need to track your keyword rankings on mobile and desktop if you want to make sure your website is visible to all your prospects, irrespective of how they search.

It is important to note that your website may rank well in the search results for desktop devices, but it may still struggle to get a good rank in the search results for mobile. Unless you start focusing on mobile device rankings, you will miss out on a significant amount of traffic from mobile users.

4. Not focusing on personalized search results

Two users may see two different results for the same search query because of personalized search results. These results are personalized to each user based on their search history, location, and other major factors. If you are neglecting personalized search results, you may get inaccurate conclusions while analyzing the keyword rankings of your website.

Without personalized search results, you will see an average ranking for a certain keyword among all the users. Average ranking is not always accurate for your target audience, as it includes rankings from users who are not interested in your services or products.

5. Relying too much on single data points

Over-reliance on single data points while analyzing your website’s keyword rankings can be a mistake. Website owners often make drastic changes to their SEO strategy when they see a significant drop in ranking position for a particular keyword. It is important to understand that keyword rankings can fluctuate because of competitor activity, algorithm updates, and user behavior.

So, give it some time before making drastic changes. Besides, a single data point may not represent your overall performance. To avoid such a mistake, you must track your keyword rankings over a longer period of time and look for trends to avoid over-relying on single data points.

6. Ignoring SERP features

You may lose some valuable traffic to your website if you do not analyze SERP features for your website’s keyword rankings. Analyzing SERP features lets you identify opportunities to optimize your website content for these features, which may result in better visibility and click-through rate (CTR) for your website.

Apart from the traditional listing in the search results, SERP features may appear as code snippets, image packs, knowledge graphs, local packs, and more. If you are ranking for a keyword with a knowledge graph, you should optimize your content to match the knowledge graph.

7. Neglecting competitor keyword movements

While tracking keyword rankings for your website, it is also important to track the competitor’s keyword rankings. When you ignore the competitor keyword movement, you miss out on a valuable opportunity to enhance your SEO strategy.

Competitor analysis helps you identify a list of potential keywords to target, improve your overall SEO performance, stay on top of changing trends, and learn what works and what does not. Your competitor may rank for a keyword that has a high volume and low competition, but you do not target it. By tracking the competitor keyword rankings, you can identify such keywords, add them to your list, and start ranking for them.

Conclusion

Your SEO success depends a lot on how you analyze your website’s keyword rankings. If you end up making one (or more) of these aforementioned mistakes, it may cost you a significant amount of organic traffic, leads, and sales.

While fluctuations in rankings are normal, you need to have patience to find the right way to boost your average position in search rankings.