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How to check and track keyword rankings
How to track keyword rankings on Google: set up a rank tracker for a country, city or exact point, price a check, run it and read the changes.
A tracker follows one domain in one place: a country, a region, a city, or an exact point. Creating it is free; you pay each time a check runs. This tutorial sets one up, runs a first check and shows you how to read it.
Create a rank tracker
Start a new tracker
Open Rank tracking and click New tracker. The domain defaults to your project's website. Subdomains count as the same site, so
blog.acme.comranks foracme.com.Choose where to search from
Place searches as someone in a country, region or city would; start typing to find it. Exact coordinates searches from a latitude and longitude, for businesses whose rankings change street by street.
Pick devices, schedule and depth
Desktop and mobile are separate checks, so both doubles the price. Depth is how many results each check reads: top 20, 50 or 100. Schedule runs checks daily, weekly or monthly in the background; manual trackers run only when you click Check rankings now, which you can also do any time on a scheduled one.
Add keywords and read the price
Paste up to 1,000 keywords, one per line. Under them, Price of a check shows one run and one month on the schedule you picked. Then click Create tracker.
Run a rank check
On the tracker, click Check rankings now and confirm the price. Progress and spend so far are shown while it runs, and you can cancel it; finished checks stay stored. If YepAPI rejects your key or your balance or monthly limit runs out, the check stops and says why.
Read ranking positions and changes
The Keywords tab has a summary (average position, top 3, top 10, top 20, improved and declined), a chart of positions, and one row per keyword. Switch device with the toggle above the tabs.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Position | Your place among the organic results. Ads, maps and other features do not push it down. "not in top 30" means not found within the depth checked. |
| Change | Places gained or lost since the previous check. "new" is a first result, "entered" means it came into the checked depth, "dropped out" that it left. |
| Best | The best position in the recent checks shown. |
| Ranking URL | Which of your pages ranks. |
| SERP features | Features on the results page. A tick marks ones your site appears in, such as a featured snippet. |
| History | A small chart of the last checks, oldest first. Gaps are checks where you were not found. |
Click a keyword for its full history and the competing pages from its latest check. Pin important keywords to keep them at the top, filter to Top 10, Improved, Not found and so on, and export the table as CSV.
The Competitors tab ranks the domains that appear most often in the top 10 for your keywords, from the latest check. It costs nothing extra: it comes from the results you already paid for.
Edit and maintain a rank tracker
- Add keywords on the Keywords tab is free. New keywords are checked on the next run, and the tracker shows how much they add to it.
- Settings changes devices, depth and schedule from the next run, with the new price shown as you change them.
- Remove keywords you no longer care about. They stop being checked and leave the list, but their history is kept: add the same keyword again and it comes back with every earlier position.
- Runs lists the last 20 checks with their cost and any error.
- A new schedule's first check lands one period ahead, at a random time between 04:00 and 10:00 UTC, so checks are spread out. Later checks keep that time: a check that starts a few minutes late does not push the next one back. Running a check by hand does not move the schedule.
- If a scheduled check comes due while you are running one by hand, it is tried again 15 minutes later rather than skipped.