How to Track Keywords and Traffic: Free and Paid Tools to Help You

I often get the question: how long should I wait for SEO traffic?

My answer is simple; it depends on benchmarks, resources, and experience. Let’s dive in.

If your competitors have strong positions on Go ogle, they earned this traffic by creating and promoting great content. There is only one way to outrank them: to create something better and promote it harder.

It takes time. I can’t tell you how to hire great copywriters fast, create a content plan, or find designers and web developers with experience and free time. Top experts are busy with other projects.

So, if you start from scratch, the biggest challenge is hiring and managing the best specialists in the trade that your competitors have. If you do this job yourself, your quality should be better than what’s currently available – and this is subjective, because Google algorithms decide it.

Quality takes time. On average, it takes even months or years. It’s frustrating waiting for results, but patience and perseverance are part of the SEO game.

Anyway, you can analyze if things go right. Use tools that show if you’re heading in the right direction or if you need to alter something in your approach.

Tracking keywords and traffic is a crucial part of any website optimization strategy. With the right tools, you can monitor your website’s performance, see what’s working or not, and make informed decisions to improve your search engine ranking.

Free tools to do this include:

• Google Search Console (GSC) provides valuable insights into how your website performs in Google search, including keyword ranking and search traffic data.
• Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides comprehensive data on website traffic, including traffic sources and user behavior.
• Bing Webmaster Tool provides similar insights as Google Search Console but for Bing search engine results.

These tools are free and a must-have. You can analyze your visibility on search engines even if you have no traffic. If you are serious about SEO performance, then paid tools help a lot more and offer many unique features.

Here is my preferred list of paid tools:

• Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that provides data on keyword ranking, backlinks, and organic search traffic.
• SEMrush is another popular SEO tool that offers keyword tracking, site audit, and backlink analysis features.
• Moz is a well-known SEO tool that offers keyword tracking, link building, and site optimization features.
• Ubersuggest is a free tool that provides keyword tracking and analysis as well as website traffic insights.

You can also search for other great tools that cost less but provide great insights. There are plenty out there.

Best practices for tracking keywords and traffic:

• Regularly monitor your keyword ranking to see how you’re performing in search results
• Track the traffic to your website and analyze the sources to see where your visitors are coming from
• Identify the keywords that are driving the most traffic to your website and optimize your content accordingly
• Monitor your backlinks to see where you’re getting the most links from and use that information to build more backlinks
• Use tools to analyze your website’s on-page optimization and make improvements to improve your search engine ranking

Tips and trends in tracking keywords and traffic:

• Utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to analyze data and make predictions about future performance
• Focus on long-tail keywords to target more specific and less competitive search terms
• Monitor the performance of your website on mobile devices, as more and more searches are being done on mobile devices
• Utilize voice search optimization to target users who are using voice search to find information

In conclusion, tracking keywords and traffic is a crucial aspect of website optimization that can help you monitor your website’s performance, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions to improve your search engine ranking.

Whether you use free or paid tools, you must regularly monitor your keywords and traffic and use that information to make informed decisions about your website optimization strategy.