You may be the most creative person in the world, but if your website isn’t optimized for search engines, you can expect it to languish and never reach its full potential. That’s where digital agencies come into play.
Aleksandra Pietrzak
We live in an era when no business can fully develop its potential without an online presence, and the chance of reaching the widest possible audience is increased by a website appropriately optimized for search engine algorithms. In our article, you will learn how to check your website’s visibility in Google using available tools and how to conduct SEO analysis to position your website.
A position is a place where or website is displayed on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) list of the search engine in response to a specific user query. From the level of such a list potential customers and recipients of our content go to the appropriate sub-pages of the site. Statistics show that most people finish their search in the first ten results displayed, which is why it is so important for our website to rank as high as possible.
None of the positions in the search engine is permanently guaranteed. The position in the SERPs depends on several factors, and the visibility of a website in Google can be improved in two ways – by paying for additional advertising or by optimizing the content on the homepage and subpages. In the second case, it is important to choose the right key phrases, but also to have a well-structured website structure that complies with SEO rules, unique content, graphic and video content, product offers, and maps.
It is also worth remembering that search results for the same query may be different for each user. Why? This is due to the improved personalization of results, which takes into account the individual preferences of recipients, their browsing history or location.
The visibility of our website in the search engine results in actual profits for the company, increasing reach and conversion rates. Verifying a website’s position on Google regularly is necessary for three reasons.
First of all, just because our website was in the top three search results for a given phrase in the first week of the month, doesn’t mean it will stay that way in the following weeks. Our competitors are also constantly fighting for higher positions in Google and optimizing their sites appropriately.
Secondly, the requirements of search engine algorithms change with updates. Google aims to make the content displayed in search results as useful to the user as possible and therefore constantly improves the performance of its bots. What gives our website a high position today, may cause it to drop tomorrow.
Finally, our potential audiences are also not constant in their feelings and preferences. They are influenced by specific inputs and current trends, so we need to constantly monitor their behaviors and keep up with them and respond to them.
Keywords, or phrases for which our website is positioned, are one of the most important factors affecting its visibility in Google. There may be several or even hundreds of them, and each query will place the website in a different position. The shorter and more general phrase, the more difficult it is to position the website for it because the competition will be higher in their case.
More precise queries, or so-called long-tail phrases, are better because they increase the chance of conversion by maximizing the audience’s needs, such as: “men’s running shoes” or “gluten-free vegetarian restaurant in Wroclaw”. Moreover, long-tail phrases are associated with less competition for search engine positions.
By monitoring the performance of our website, we are actually looking at what specific phrases it is positioned for. This means that without knowing the keywords, we are unable to determine the visibility of our site.
This is the most time-consuming and inconvenient way, which is worth using only when we need to check the position for several phrases. It simply involves manually typing individual keywords into the search engine box and finding our website in the SERP results. However, keep in mind that the analysis may differ significantly from reality due to our individual preferences and search settings. Therefore, it is preferable to do it in incognito mode, and to be sure, log out of all accounts and delete cookies.
This is a free tool for webmasters and SEO experts that shows how Google indexes and presents a website in search results. It collects and processes data to determine a website’s position in the search engine’s SERP ranking, as well as monitors the number of impressions and calculates the CTR (click-through rate) for specific phrases. Of all the free tools available, Google Search Console boasts the most extensive functionality and accuracy of the generated results. It is easy to use and has a user-friendly interface, so even SEO beginners can manage it.
A free SERP checker-type tool for very basic SEO analysis. You just need to enter your domain address and up to 5 key phrases at a time in the appropriate fields. The tool will search through the first 10 pages of a search engine and after a few seconds it will show the results in the form of a table. The tool will show the results in the form of a table. You will know what position your website occupies for each query. The data can be downloaded as a report.
Like gspot WebPozycja is a SERP checker application, but it provides more options. The free version imposes on us a daily limit – a maximum of 15 phrases for 10 pages. In the paid version we can search for even several hundreds of queries, generate reports, choose location or type of device, conduct competition analysis and check the position of our website also in Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube.
It is a professional and comprehensive tool facilitating verification of a website’s performance and keyword selection, as well as allowing comparative analysis with competitors’ data. It stores SERP history for up to 16 months, generates periodic reports, and detects possible optimization problems. Unfortunately, the application is paid, although we can try it for free for 14 days before purchasing.
Similar possibilities and functionality are offered by such tools as SeoStation, Ahrefs, or SemStorm. An interesting option is also Stat4Seo, which after the purchase we receive for life and does not limit us with daily limits for search phrases.
GSC allows us to monitor only the website or domain to which we have rights. That is why it will be impossible to benchmark your competitors’ data. Nevertheless, the tool offers the most possibilities of all the free products. Not only will you check your website’s visibility and positioning for specific queries, but you will also identify problematic URLs, optimize the mobile version of your website and collect data about your audience.
With this amount of features and zero cost, Google Search Console will be the number one choice for SEO amateurs and beginners. So how to use it?
Before we move on to the actual analysis, we need to make sure that our site appears in the search results in general. For this purpose, we check the indexation of the website. We can do this by using a simple command, “site:sitename.pl”, which we type in the search box. Another way is to use the appropriate option in GSC. If your website is not indexed, a few clicks in the application may change it.
We log into our Google account, go to Google Search Console and select the type of service we want to add. This determines how we verify our rights to the website. Two options are available:
If we want to add more websites to Search Console, we need to expand the list in the menu, select “Add Service” and again perform the appropriate
Checking the position of the website in Google
In GSC it is very easy to check the position of your website in Google for specific keywords. To do this, go to the “Effectiveness” tab and check the “Average position” box. Lower down on the page, you will generate the keywords, number of impressions and clicks, and the average position. To order the phrases in order of increasing or decreasing position, click the arrow next to the word “Position”.
To view queries and positions within a specific range, we use the filter at the top right of the statistics table.
In Search Console, you can view statistics about a specific query or a word that should be included in that query. If you want to check all key phrases for which a given page is positioned in the search engine, in the “Effectiveness” tab, select the “Pages” category.
We will see a list of URLs ordered by the number of clicks, starting with the most popular ones. We select the address we want to analyze and go to the “Queries” category. Here, we will get a full list of key phrases for which the given website is positioned. After activating the “Average position” field, we will see the position for each of these phrases.
If we have trouble finding the URL we are interested in on the list, just use the filter above the chart. A window will appear where we can choose to display results for the exact URL and enter it in the box below.
As you can notice, using Google Search Console is not difficult. It is worth getting used to this tool and giving yourself time to discover its possibilities. However, if it is not enough for us, we can choose from a variety of paid applications and platforms. We just need to choose the one that best suits our needs – after all, we will work with it regularly to keep our website at the top of the rankings.
Aleksandra Pietrzak
Wiktoria CzerwAleksandra PietrzakGet started
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