How to Check What Keywords Your Site Is Ranking For, the Botify Way

21st May 2019Kyle Blanchette

By Kyle Blanchette, Search Data Specialist, Botify

Checking where your website’s pages rank on Google and other search engines is an essential KPI that every SEO specialist wants to report on. Knowing what organic position your URLs are in for various queries helps you understand where you’re doing well and what you might need to improve.

To accomplish this task, you’ll need rank tracking software, and it’s important to keep in mind that not all rank tracking software is created equal.

It’s easy to use a tool without giving much thought to where the data comes from, but at Botify, it’s something we care deeply about.

Botify Keywords is powered by the Google Search Console API. This allows our customers to see real queries, position data, and click-through rates for all their URLs.

This means you:

• Don’t have to pay per keyword you track
• Don’t need to limit yourself to only a handful of keywords
• Don’t have to manually enter keywords to track
• Can see the keywords you didn’t even know you were ranking for

You may also be interested in our article “Keyword Tracking for Enterprise SEO: Scale, Segmentation, & Real Searcher Data.”

Good citizens of the web

Another reason we’re so passionate about using the Google Search Console (GSC) API for rank tracking is that we’re striving to be good citizens of the web.

By using Google’s own data for rank tracking, we ensure we’re not violating their terms of service. If we used an alternative method for rank tracking, such as scraping Google’s search results, we’d be blatantly ignoring Google’s directives.

Thankfully, scraping Google SERPs for position data isn’t our only option. Google provides this themselves via Google Search Console (GSC). While anyone who signs up for a GSC account can get a limited view of data such as position, impressions, and clicks, the real value comes when you access the full dataset via the API.

Using the GSC API, Botify is able to pull data well beyond the first 1,000 rows that you might see in the GSC interface. This allows us to get much more detailed performance views for URLs or queries that are not in the top 1,000 rows in GSC – which is especially important for enterprise websites.

The benefits of using Google Search Console for rank tracking

When we were creating Botify, we knew Google Search Console was the route we wanted to go. Botify and Google share common DNA: both strive to help people make their websites crawlable, indexable, and rank for relevant queries.

Through the Google Search Console API, Botify gives website owners visibility into how their site is performing for important queries in search results, all in an above-board way.

Here are just some of the amazing things you can do with Botify Keywords, powered by Google Search Console data:

• View total keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position over time.
• View trending keywords – learn when people are searching more or less for your keywords to help you better explain declines in organic traffic or revenue.
• Identify your top non-branded keywords by country.
• Learn what pages are ranking higher on desktop than mobile.

You can read more about the benefits here and here.

From ranking to revenue, Botify Keywords gives you visibility into the entire search process

Keyword ranking is important, but that metric doesn’t carry intrinsic meaning. Mature organizations will want to know not only in what position they’re ranking, but how that ranking is contributing to their bottom line.

As you can see from the image below, Botify Keywords makes this possible.

This data also enables us to create custom organic CTR curves, which can help you create sophisticated models to forecast performance by segment or section of the website.

By pulling in ranking data from Google Search Console and pairing it with information from your analytics platform and log files, you get unified data that shows you how your keyword rankings relate to every phase of the search process.

Botify helps you identify the actual ways consumers are searching for you by providing real, not scraped, keyword data. In doing so, we bring transparency and predictability to the entire organic search process.

With the Google Search Console API, we’re proud to be able to give SEOs millions of actual user queries and rankings per domain — more data than they’ve ever had before. To see it in action, request your demo today.

Want to learn more about Google Search Console’s keyword capabilities? Check out our article “The Ultimate Guide to GSC Keyword Data.”