While this update may not necessarily translate into ranking shifts for every website, its impact is significant. It permanently changes the way we evaluate user experience for our SEO strategies.

In this article, I’ll walk you through Advanced Web Ranking’s latest features that aim to help you integrate page experience monitoring into your search tracking workflow and make the most out of this new algorithm change.

Do Core Web Vitals Impact Rankings?

There has been a lot of debate and speculation among professionals regarding how impactful this Google algorithm update will be on search rankings, and even Google themselves deemed the update to be a minor one, so you can only expect your SEO clients to get confused about this as well: 

“Do we need to care about this page experience thing?” 

“Are we going to see any ranking changes from this Google update?”. 

In fact, a recent study we conducted at Advanced Web Ranking showed that most websites are not yet aligned with Google’s page experience requirements:

From more than 65k URLs we analyzed, only 3% of pages got a “Good” performance score on Mobile, and merely 27% of URLs were top-rated for their performance on Desktop devices. 

With so many websites disregarding page performance and accessibility, the update may bring great opportunity for improved rankings to those few websites that meet Google’s requirements.

The impact of the Page Experience update has been slowly growing over the last few weeks since the rollout began: 

While we cannot yet predict how impactful the update will be when fully rolled out at the end of August 2021, it will be very interesting to watch how SERPs change during the following months and how many websites start taking action to improve their user experience scores.

Page performance monitoring in AWR

To help you monitor this new ranking factor and its impact on SERPs, Advanced Web Ranking has created a new Page Experience report that you can access directly from the app side menu. 

The AWR Page Experience report provides a web performance overview for your main website’s Index page, helping you quickly assess your site’s performance status and progress right from the app.

Performance Overview

When you first access the report, you’ll see the initial audit report that we automatically ran for your website, with the main performance metrics:

• The General Performance Score – summarizes the users’ experience on your page and is calculated as a weighted average of the other performance metrics.  
• The Core Web Vitals and Metrics – from which the General Performance Score is calculated, quantify performance on distinct facets of a user’s experience on your webpage. 

Easy to read

Before diving into any of the potential issues reflected by the Page Experience audit report, you’ll be able to quickly understand how your page performs just by eye-scanning the report data.

Every metric is color-coded so that you can rapidly read through the data and pull the essential information right away:

Across devices

By default, the report will show your page’s performance on desktop devices, but you can easily change the device from the top drop-down menu.

Each new performance audit you perform with AWR will automatically collect data across both desktop and mobile devices.

Track progress over time

Once you have a minimum of two performance audits ran for your project, the Comparison view will be enabled for the Page Experience report.

The Comparison view shows a progress chart with how your General Performance score has evolved and lets you compare performance metrics at different moments in time.

Keep in mind that additional performance experience updates do not impact your resource consumption. You can run as many audits as you need without any influence on your subscription cost.

In-depth analysis with just one click

When performance scores signal that you need to work on your pages’ experience, you can quickly move forward to Wattspeed with just one click and get into the nitty-gritty of site performance to fix whatever is holding you back from a perfect page experience score.

Once you click the General Performance chart, you will be redirected to Wattspeed where a free in-depth audit will automatically start for your page.

Wattspeed is a free site performance monitoring app by AWR that provides in-depth details on quickly resolving the issues found during the performance audit and improving your scores. 

To track your performance progress in Wattspeed further, you also have the option to create a free Wattspeed account.

Correlating page performance improvements with search visibility changes

In addition to tracking your page performance progress, the AWR Page Experience report also helps you measure how that performance influenced your organic search visibility.

For that, you can display on the same report chart, both your General Performance Score’s evolution and that of your website’s Visibility Percent, and see if there’s any correlation between them.

Hopefully, any improvement in your page performance will translate into higher search visibility.

Integrating page experience into client SEO reports

Page performance status is something that you may want to start reporting on in the future and keep your clients or stakeholders informed on its progress.

For scheduled reports, a Performance KPI widget is now available that you can already include in your reports, where relevant.

Coming up next

The AWR Page Experience report is barely at an initial stage, with lots more improvements to come. 

Next in line, we’re working to provide page experience info on competitor websites that would help you make more accurate SERP analyses and detect search opportunities faster.

Moreover, deeper and more meaningful integrations between page performance and search rankings are also currently in development. 

Stay tuned for the next updates, and please reach out if you have any feedback on this. We’d love to know your thoughts.

Therefore it is a challenging task to identify and keep track of every website that aims for the same searchers as you do.

Numerous tools can help you throughout the stages of the competitor analysis process. Still, in this article, I’ll focus only on how to gather and filter your list of SEO competitors and share with you the steps you need to take to accomplish this with Advanced Web Ranking.

Start with the competition you know

Although your business’s competition for providing the same type of products or services is rarely identical with the competition you’ll face in search, it is always a great starting point in your competitor research.

So let’s go ahead and set up a new project in AWR and see how this works.

For demonstration, I’ll use the allrecipes.com website – it’s the same domain we often use in our demos, so you may be familiar with it.

I’ll also add to my project the few competitors that I already have in mind for the allrecipes.com website:

• food.com
• foodnetwork.com
• thekitchn.com
• bonappetit.com

Right from the project setup, I can ask AWR to find related domains to my website and expand my list of competitor sites. It all happens when I click the [Show Suggestions] button:

The neat thing with this tool is that I can run multiple websites through for suggestions, including my competitors’. 

For each query, the tool will return the top ten most authoritative websites related to my input. 

Some of the results I got overlap, but with just a few queries, I gathered 20 competitor sites, which is definitely enough information to get me started.

Identify your most prominent SEO competitors 

Once my project is set and fresh rankings have been gathered for my initial keyword set, I’m ready to see how the SERPs look like and who’s ranking where. 

For this, the Market Share report offers the best overview since it merges my SEO competitors across the entire keyword set and all the search engines I’m interested in.

More specifically, it shows me the top 20 domains that rank in the search results I’m interested in, along with details about the keywords they rank for and how that compares to my website’s search visibility.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the list of competitors I gathered earlier matches only partially with the competitors found in the Market Share report. The competition I’m facing in search results for these keywords is quite different from what I expected, based on my previous research.

This means that to refine my list of tracked competitors, I need to do two things:

• Add to my project and start monitoring the most prominent competitors found in the Market Share report. These are the websites that show up in SERPs for most of my tracked keywords so I’ll probably need to outrank lots of their pages.

• Go back to the competitors that don’t rank for this set of terms and find out what keywords they use in their strategies. And I’ll show you how to do that in AWR next.

Expand your reach to the keywords your competitors are targeting, and you don’t

The competitors you found for your niche that do not rank for many of the keywords you track are a great source of inspiration for new keywords to target.

If they don’t get their search visibility from the exact keywords as you, it can only mean that they are targeting other terms that you may not have found yet. 

Researching and adding more keywords to your project at this point is worthwhile since it lets you make a more beneficial selection of the competitors worth monitoring and analyzing.

The keyword suggestion tool in AWR works similarly to the competitor suggestion tool we used earlier in our research. Run each competitor domain through the keyword suggestion tool and see what keywords they rank for.

Refine your list of competitors

In addition to keeping an eye on your most powerful SEO competitors, you may find yourself needing also to track the evolution of other, not-so-prominent-in-SERPs websites or pages that you compete against for some of your most important keywords. 

For example, here is the Top Site in Time report for one of my most important keywords ‘tuna casserole’ for which I managed to secure the 2nd position (red line) and which shows some heavy changes lately.

Naturally, I’m interested in keeping a close eye on those websites (teal and purple chart lines) that keep bouncing between rankings and threaten to weaken my search visibility.

I may not need to track these websites in the long term, but at least for a while, until the volatility of this SERP lowers, it’s helpful to keep them under the radar.

That’s it!

With this process, you should be able to get a good understanding of who are your SEO competitors at the moment and how strong is their presence in SERPs.

Keep in mind though that search competitors change over time, so it’s always a good idea to go back and reassess your list.

Debates started to grow intense on whether rankings, as we knew them, are still reliable for making SEO strategy decisions in the context of the current, very diverse, and extremely dynamic SERPs.

As a rank tracker at the core, Advanced Web Ranking took the first step to adapt to the new SERP reality by introducing a new position tracking model that enables you to consider all the SERP features when determining a listing’s ranking in search.

The great thing with the new position tracking model is that it lets you measure your actual position in SERP, regardless of whether you are listed as typical “blue links” or carousels, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or any other features.

However, this still leaves us with a few unanswered questions:

• How much space do the SERP features listed before you occupy on the searchers’ device screens? And how far down the search results page will these features push your listing?

• What happens when ads are also listed at the top of the search results page? How many ads will Google display for each query, and how much space will these take up from the searchers’ device screens?

We built the new Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution metrics precisely to answer these remaining questions, bringing us closer to a fuller and more accurate understanding of our websites’ visibility in search results.

Pixel Position

Just as its name suggests, Pixel Position measures your ranking in pixels, meaning the number of pixels from the top of the search results page to the search result URL.

For SERPs with a great variety of result types, Pixel Position proves extremely helpful in determining just how extensive each search result is and how far down the page your listing is being pushed by everything that’s listed before you.

Let’s take a look at an example. 

I have the search results page for the “how big is the universe” query here and the Pixel Positions for this SERP, as calculated by AWR.

In Advanced Web Ranking, you can find the Pixel Position metric for each SERP listing in the Top Sites report, where you need to select the keyword and the search engine for which you wish to make the analysis, as well as a date from the calendar. 

While on a blue-links-only search results page the no.1 listing has a Pixel Position of about 172px, for my “how big is the universe” example, I see that the first listing is already 609px down the search results page.

That’s more than three times lower than a first result would usually be on a “typical” search results page.

With a Carousel inserted at the top of the page and the first position being a Featured Snippet, it makes sense to be lower on the page than usual. But let me click the “View SERP” button to see exactly how the SERP looks like.

For SERPs such as this one here, Pixel Position helps us highlight what impact search features have over the other listings’ visibility and measure that visibility. 

Above and below the fold search results

Once we’re able to determine the height of each search result on the page in pixels, we should also determine what’s above the fold and what’s beneath it.

However, the fold is a subjective measure, depending on the device used when performing the search query.

A user searching from a 1366x768px laptop will see fewer results on their screen than another user who performs the same search from a 1920x1080px desktop device.

More than the device screen size, the screen resolution will also impact how much from a search results page a user will see on the screen without having to scroll.

Hence it would be nearly impossible to make a 100% precise prediction of what each user sees above the fold on a search results page. 

In Advanced Web Ranking, we take the most popular screen sizes as a reference for both desktop and mobile SERPs and mark the fold line accordingly.

We then use color-coding to set apart the above the fold search listings from those that fall under the fold line. 

Visibility Distribution

Since Pixel Position has an extensive range of values, from somewhere around 100px and up to 15000px, it is not a comfortable metric for analysis of large keyword sets. It would get really cumbersome if you needed to remember the Pixel Position across a few dozen terms.

That’s why we came up with Visibility Distribution. 

Visibility Distribution helps you aggregate the information you would otherwise get from the Pixel Position metric.

Visibility Distribution is calculated as a percentage and shows how close your listing is from the top of the SERP. The higher your listing is on the search results page, the closer Visibility Distribution will get to 100%.

Visibility Distribution vs. the other Visibility metrics

Having yet another visibility metric for your reporting may seem a bit confusing at first, so let me lay out the differences between these SEO metrics and see how they can work together to provide you with more information on your search performance.

Let’s take another example to see both metrics in action.

I’ll head over to the Visibility menu, where I can see both metrics side by side, calculated for my keyword selection, and I see that my Visibility Percent is 92.78%, while my Visibility Distribution is merely 35.76%. 

This tells me that while my rankings are in general very high (92.78%), my listings are not placed that high up the search results page as I would expect them to be (only 35.76% Visibility Distribution).

Moving forward to the Keyword Ranking report, which contains all the data columns that I need at this point – Ranking Position, Features on SERP, and Visibility Distribution – I can scan through the keywords and see how my low Visibility Distribution corresponds to either a lower position in results or to some voluminous SERP features included before my listings in SERPs.

Explore Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution with your keyword data

If you’re an Advanced Web Ranking user, you already have Pixel Position and Visibility Distribution data available into your account, so head over to your AWR projects to start analysing your pixel rankings. 

And if you haven’t tried AWR yet, this is a great opportunity to take a free 30 day trial with us and check out the new ranking metrics. 

Give these a go!

Featured Snippet listings get less than half the clicks a no.1 listing would typically get in organic-only SERPs.

Source: Advanced Web Ranking CTR Study research data

Research data help you shed some light on the influence search features have on people’s click behavior and what results to expect from organic search, given the Google results page’s current anatomy.

Studies, however, can only paint half the picture. 

To figure out if search features are (or could be) beneficial for your organic visibility, you also need to compare with the CTR you are getting in SERPs with features, not just from aggregated data. 

In this brief article, I’ll show you how you can measure your own CTR for SERP features with Advanced Web Ranking and how to get a detailed look at the overall impact search features have on your performance in SERPs. 

We’ll talk about how to:

• Measure your CTR curve for SERPs with features
• Determine what features drive the most clicks
• Research GSC keywords that trigger search features

Let’s get started.

Measure your organic CTR in SERPs with search features

The only reliable source we have for measuring how many people click our listings in search is Google’s Search Console, so that’s where we’ll start from.

The only culprit GSC data has is that it won’t tell you which of the keywords trigger search features, nor which features are triggered so you can estimate as to how SERPs features correlate with your CTRs and Impression count.

But that’s a problem we can quickly solve with a rank tracker, in this case, Advanced Web Ranking, that has SERP features tracking capabilities.

We’ll pair GSC and ranking together data and see how CTRs change when different features are included in the SERP.

In Advanced Web Ranking, you’ll find all this information in the CTR Trends menu, the SERP Features report, that takes all your GSC monthly data and breaks it down for you by search features.

Let’s say you want to measure how Featured snippets have interfered with your listings in organic search:

• Did you get a better CTR when your website was listed in a featured snippet? 
• Or did it steal any clicks from you when you weren’t listed as one?

The first thing you’ll do is go back to the research data and look at how the CTR curve typically looks for SERPs with Featured Snippets compared with organic-only SERPs.

This shows that in general, when Featured Snippets are present, the CTR for the first search results listing, which is the Snippet itself, drops considerably, while positions 2 to 5 get a slight increase in CTR as compared to what they get in organic-only listings.

With this in mind, you can now look at your own CTR curve and see how it compares with the global values in the CTR Trend report.

In this example, my CTR curve for SERPs with Featured Snippets, the blue line, is slightly above the average, gray one, for the top 1 to 4 rankings.

So it seems that when I’m listed as a Featured Snippet, at the top of the SERP, I get a slightly better CTR than what Featured Snippets usually get, according to the research data. Nonetheless, that’s nowhere near the CTR I would be getting for a top position in SERPs with no Featured Snippets.

On the other hand, when I’m listed right below the Featured Snippet, on positions 2 to 4, although I get more or less the same CTR as the average curve line, that’s already a better CTR than those recorded for organic-only SERPs. 

For my particular case, a more in-depth analysis would be required to determine whether getting listed as a Featured Snippet is truly beneficial for my website and is worth pursuing. 

Which search features drive the most clicks

To achieve visibility from search features, you’ll want to identify the most frequently triggered features by the queries in your niche that also get reasonable amounts of clicks simultaneously.  

The CTR Trends report introduces a SERP Feature Popularity score that helps you determine which features are triggered most often by the keywords you appear in search results for.

This score has two values: one is per project, based on the keywords retrieved from your GSC account, and one is global, based on the entire data set we have available for processing in our research tools. 

Having both values available lets you understand how you stand as opposed to other industries.

For instance, I may be lured by the idea of getting organic exposure from the Images search feature, knowing that one-quarter of queries are triggering first-page images results. 

Still, by looking at my project’s popularity score, I quickly realize that I have no chance of doing that with my current set of keywords. 

To find the most popular features for my keyword set, I simply run through the list and look at their Project Popularity score. 

I’m getting that People Also Ask (PAA) is the most frequently triggered feature by my keywords, with a Popularity of 63.82%.

This means that 63.82% of the keywords that I have Impressions for are triggering PAA blocks, way above the Global average frequency of 39.31%.

The chart also shows that I’m missing quite a bit of CTR opportunity with my top-ranked keywords, getting almost half the CTR first positions usually in SERPs with PAA blocks.

Search Console keywords that trigger featured snippets

Suppose you’re looking to improve organic visibility with search features. In that case, you also need to find new keyword ideas that are guaranteed to have the targeted feature in SERP, and Search Console is always a great starting point for researching keywords. 

Further down in the CTR Trends report, you’ll find listed, for each selected SERP Feature, the keywords from your Search Console account that trigger the respective feature in search results, along with the specific GSC metrics: Clicks, Impressions, Average Position, and CTR.

Being pulled from GSC, these keywords are also guaranteed to be deemed as relevant by Google for your website, nevertheless not every one of these keywords is worth investing time and effort into.

Thus you would probably want to give this list a closer look and make a proper selection. 

There are a few filters available you can use to narrow the list of keywords to those you’re listed most often for and from which you already get lots of clicks.

At this point, you may also find useful the SERP Feature Average Position calculated for your keyword set, which tells you, on average, the position where each feature was found ranking. 

By comparing this to your website’s average ranking for each keyword, you’re able to correctly evaluate your chances of winning the feature and the amount of work needed to achieve that.

Take it for a spin

The organic CTR curve will continue to shape itself as the SERPs evolve, and the users’ click behavior changes. It’s a metric that you’ll need to reassess regularly. 

At the same time, search features continue to grab the users’ attention in SERPs so they become great opportunities for achieving extra organic visibility.

This report brings the two together and gives you the means to take a more in-depth and actionable look at your organic CTR curve.

It would be great to know what you think of it.

Meaning that the great majority of SEO professionals simultaneously manage, and therefore track SEO performance for multiple projects.

If you’re reading this, there’s a very big chance that you, too, are part of this majority, so read on, this article is for you. 

In this article, I’ll walk you through AWR’s project performance tracking dashboard, that helps you do just that: keep track of progress for all your projects in a single SEO dashboard.

Let’s check it out!

Projects’ Ranking Performance Dashboard

The dashboard is comprised of data blocks, one for each project in your AWR account. 

The data blocks gather information about your projects’ performance in SERP and allow you to check in an instant:

• If your websites’ visibility in SERP has changed
• How visibility changes have influenced the percentage of clicks you can expect to receive from SERPs
• Which page, keyword group and search market are currently the most effective for each project.

Visibility Progress

Being color coded, the SERP Visibility progress chart will instantly catch your eye on the dashboard.

Just by scrolling through the list of projects, it’s super easy to see which projects have changes that require your attention.

And if you’re ready to look closer on a project, click the visibility chart on the dashboard, and it will take you right to the Visibility report where the data has been pulled from, so you can run a deeper analysis of things.

Performance Metrics

In addition to Visibility evolution, there are three more SEO performance metrics included in each block: 

• the number of keywords Ranked, 
• their Average Rank 
• and the estimated Click Share driven from these rankings.

Together with visibility, these metrics should help you get a better understanding of what changed in SERP for your websites and how impactful those changes were for your organic traffic.

You can click on each of these metrics to drill further down into the data, look at specific keyword ranking changes and gain actionable insights.

If you however prefer a different metric combination for your dashboard, very soon you will be able to customize what metrics to show for each project. So stay tuned for news on that.

Winning strategies

For each project, the dashboard also holds information about what works best at the moment:

• Best Group – which group of keywords is estimated to drive the highest amount of organic traffic
• Best Page – which website page is currently most visible in SERPs for keywords with high volumes 
• Best Search Market – which search engine brings you the most traffic

Project settings shortcuts

And of course you can also manage your project preferences from here. You can:

• Tag and organize projects
• See and adjust the ranking update frequency (daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, on-demand)
• Check sharing status on each project and change permissions

Give it a go

Would love to hear how the dashboard works for you, so please be sure to share your thoughts and feedback. I look forward to it.

From thousands of SERPs tracked, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of a visibility drop, which pages of your website lost their rankings and for which keywords.

In this article, I’ll share with you an AWR workflow, based on keyword ranking distributions and keyword segmentation, that helps you find out precisely where you lost ground in SERPs and where you need to focus your efforts to gain back your visibility.

If you’re new to AWR, be sure to sign up for a free trial account
to follow things through with us.

Let’s get started.

Acknowledging the Visibility Drop

It all starts with that horrific moment when you log into your rank tracker and see that once beautiful, ascending visibility chart line, now going…. down.

That sucks, big time. But hey, we can fix this, that’s what we do

Visibility is a great metric for weighting a website’s overall performance in SERPs, but it would only take us this far.

At most, we can compare visibility for keyword groups, to see if there’s one particular group of keywords that has lost rankings, but that still leaves us half way through to knowing what pages we need to focus on and what keywords.

So, we prefer moving over to the Ranking > Distribution report, and take a different approach.

Distribution of rankings

The Rankings distribution report splits keywords into segments, depending on their ranking, for our website and competitors.

This is great because it lets us understand the dynamic in SERPs:

• How my keywords are moving from one segment to another
• How my losses become my competitors’ gains, and vice versa

As a general rule, seeing red labels across this SEO report is not necessarily a bad thing.

But having your number of ranked Keywords decrease by 45 terms, like our website – allrecipes.com – in this example has, is really BAD.

By looking at the distribution, it’s likely that the majority of loses come from the 2-5 and 21-50 segments. Let’s find out what changed.

Pages that got impacted

The same Ranking Distribution report also lets you drill keywords down per URL, and find out which are the pages that lost the most rankings:

In our case, we have a category page that dropped out of top 100 search results for a lot of keywords – allrecipes.com/recipes/79/desserts/ – and a few other pages with less significant ranking losses.

We’ll focus first on this category page – /recipes/79/desserts/ – and move forward to determine the keywords for which the page lost rankings for.

Keywords we’ve lost rankings for

We’ll use ranking filters with the Ranking > Keywords report, to determine which keywords have got their ranking changed from each ranking distribution interval.

We’ll leave the number of ranked keywords for last, so let’s start with “First Place”.

I’m applying filters and find that we have:

• 1 keyword no longer ranking 1st for; it has moved into the 11-20 ranking segment

• 2 keywords have fallen from above to below the fold of 1st page of results;

• And from all the 19 keywords that have existed the 21-50 ranking interval, there isn’t a single one that is still ranking.

When a URL filter is applied, the app only shows keywords that are still ranking. That’s because the app cannot connect a dropped keyword to a URL, so it will not show you the keywords that are currently dropped for your URL.

Therefore, we’ll use a quick workaround to determine the keywords that dropped out of top 100, and their URLs.

First off, we pull out the list of dropped keywords:

Select all dropped keywords and assign them to a new keyword group – [Lost Keywords]:

Switch the date selection to the initial date and display [Lost keyword] group:

There you have it

At this point we have a clear diagnosis of the URLs and keywords that lost ground in SERPs.

You can use this workflow for any visibility changes, favorable or not, and easily figure out if the ranking changes were the consequences of something you made and if you need to take any actions or make improvements.

Hope you’ll give it a go, and please be sure to share your ideas and feedback. I’d love to hear how it’s working for you.

While all these sources are great, in this article I’d like to show you a different routine for researching and choosing keywords for website optimisation, that is based on competitor research, keyword indexes and the keywords from Google Search Console. 

I’ll also link-out, at the end of this article, to some good resources for standard keyword research, that we have tried over time and got good results with.

The keyword research process I’ll showcase here is performed, from beginning to end, with Advanced Web Ranking, so be sure to log into your AWR account to follow things through, or sign up for a free trial account, if you’re new to AWR.

Let’s get started.

Project setup for keyword research

As a rank tracker, Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) revolves around keyword lists. So, whether you already have a keyword set to begin with for your website optimisation, and you’re aiming to expand it, or you’re starting fresh, with zero keywords, you’ll find this process of keyword researching and management useful.

In any case, to keep things neat, I suggest you create a new AWR project for this research, where you’ll collect the new keyword suggestions (in addition to your currently targeted set, if available), evaluate, refine and organize terms for further tracking and optimisation.

Keyword suggestions for your website

Right from the beginning, when you’re setting up a new project, you have the option to request keyword suggestions to choose from. Click the [Show suggestions] button to get started with your research:

By default, the first set of keyword suggestions will be retrieved for your own website, but the system also works with other websites or keywords as well. 

So, once you have selected all that’s relevant from this initial set of suggestions received for your own domain, I recommend that you put in all your known/direct competitors and some of your most broad keywords, to gather as many keyword suggestions as you can. 

Don’t worry about selecting duplicates, they won’t be added to the bucket.

Of course, there’s a caveat to that. Adding keywords in bulk at this step may also mean extra keyword selection work later on, when you’ll need to filter out any keywords that are totally  irrelevant for you. So you may want to at least scan through the lists of suggestions before adding them to the basket.

And if you want to play safe you can also set a Search Volume filtering criteria right from the start, to get only high-volume search terms, but I wouldn’t worry about that at this moment. 

Just make sure to filter out any competitor brand terms or keywords that are not relevant for you, and you’re good to move forward to the next step.

Tip: Before completing the project setup, I recommend you to set the ranking update frequency for the project to [Paused]. 

This will prevent an auto ranking update to run for your research project, and enable you to request a one-time ranking update, with, preferably, a fast ranking data turnaround.

More keywords from competitors

Although the keyword list is still in progress, you need to run a ranking update at this moment, for AWR to be able to compute the market share distribution. 

This will give you insight on who are the market leaders for the topics added in your research basket so far and where do you stand on that market.

But more important for the keyword research you’re performing now, is that this report will highlight new, important competitors you can use in the research and steal keyword suggestions from.

To get keyword ideas for these new competitors, you need to run each website through the keyword suggestions gathering process. For this, head over to Settings > Keywords, click the [Add keywords] button and repeat the same process as you did for the project setup.

Keywords that you’re already ranking for 

Next, add to the research the keywords Google provides for your website in your Search Console account.

You can automate their import, by connecting AWR to your Google Search Console account.

AWR will import your GSC data and display it through a dedicated section (Google Data >  Search Console) but the keywords found in Search Console are not automatically added to the project for further tracking. 

You get to choose what keywords are worth pursuing and which are not.

For this, you can start by sorting the keyword list descending by Clicks and Impressions, and get the most effective terms first.

Also, you can use the text filters to run through the list quicker. However, you need to make sure you go over the entire list, so you won’t miss any important keywords.

You may find keywords with low position and few impressions, but highly relevant and worth including in your research.

Evaluate, refine and group keywords

Okay, you should now have a consistent list of potential terms to target for your website, so what you’ll want to do next is to prioritize it and trim the list down to a shorter, more relevant, set of keywords.

Run another ranking update for this project and head over to Rankings >  Keywords, to see all the keyword data in one place – GSC metrics, AdWords metrics, rankings.

This is where you’ll be doing most of the keyword processing work needed to come up with an organized list of the most impactful keywords to target with your website.

Keyword categories are very useful at this point. You can group terms into smaller, more manageable sets, according to the page they’re targeted on, semantics, search interest, performance or any other criteria you find relevant.

Expand the list as you go

Although it is essential to have a thorough keyword research at the beginning of any SEO project, it will not be a one time task. You need to constantly keep track of keyword trends, spot new opportunities and stay on top of the keyword game.

You may find yourself needing to extend the research on some terms, or go back to reassess the market share distribution and research the competition once more.

Give it a try!

So with that, I’ll leave you to explore this keyword research process yourself, and see how it works for your own projects. Please don’t hesitate to pass-on your feedback and experiences.

Do you have any tips or preferred methods you can share with us for researching keywords? 

Join the conversation in the comments below.

And as promised, here are some alternative keyword research resources you may also find useful:

• https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/google-didnt-want-us-to-use-the-keyword-planner-this-way/
• https://bloggingwizard.com/keyword-research-guide/
• https://searchengineland.com/advanced-page-level-keyword-research-279645
• https://mangools.com/blog/keyword-research/
• https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/keyword-research-using-quora-and-reddit/
• https://megamikejr.com/blog/sem/what-search-terms-are-people-using-to-find-my-website

• Your website next to its most important competitors (one of the most typical setups)
• Multiple URLs tracked, all from the same website
• Variations of a single website or subdomains targeting different locations

and more.

With AWR, you can track up to 50 websites or URLs per project, and measure their performance side by side, through one of the dedicated SEO reports:

• My Sites [new] – compare ranking performance of all webpages, for one keyword at a time
• Comparison Websites – compare the websites’ positions in SERP across the entire keyword list or by keyword group
• Visibility Websites – compare visibility and other aggregated SERP performance metrics for tracked websites
• Visibility SERP Features – compare how tracked websites perform in terms of SERP features.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the My Sites report, that brings together metrics from four different arenas to broaden your website performance monitoring and analysis.

Here’s what you’ll find inside.

Keyword performance

First off, the essential metrics for comparing your websites’ ranking performance for the targeted keyword: Position, Page and Best Position.

SERP Features tracking

Add up the SERP Features ranking column to see who from your tracked websites is listed as special features in the selected SERP.

Top Keywords

Correlate with each website’s top performing keyword and get a better understanding of their potential in SERPs.

Website prominence in SERP

And gain context for your analysis, by including the websites’ global SERP performance for the keyword set that you are tracking: the number of keywords for which websites are ranking and estimated organic visits driven from these keywords.

Give it a try!

Once you give the My Sites report a go, please let me know how it works for you. Would love to hear your feedback on this.

To explore this report with your own ranking data, be sure to log into your AWR account or start a free 30 days AWR trial, if you’re new to AWR.

But once you’ve created your segments and sliced the data into smaller, more relevant groups, you also need to think about setting up performance tracking to keep an eye on how each segment performs over time.

And while this SEO tracking process is pretty straight forward for static keyword segments that you create by manually picking the terms for each group, it gets a lot trickier for dynamic segments created based on keywords’ performance.

In AWR, there are a couple of Visibility reports that enable SERP performance tracking for dynamic groups over time, which we’ll discuss in this article.

We’ll go through a few examples, so be sure to sign in to your AWR account, if you’d like to follow along with me, and quickly pick up how to set things up for your own projects.

Track visibility progress for dynamic groups of keywords

Let’s take, for example, a client for which I’ve been working on improving rankings for top search volume keywords that have moderate competition.

So, I’m naturally interested in seeing how things went for this specific keyword segment, and if I gained any improvement in SERP visibility for these keywords.

To start tracking visibility evolution for my keyword segment, I’ll head over first to the Visibility – Websites report view.

Here, while making sure I’m looking at “All keywords”, I define the time interval since I started making improvements on the website and apply filtering to segment my keywords to high search volume and low competition.

For this example, I’ve set the keywords’ search volume to fit the 500 – 1000 interval, and competition between 0 and 0.2.

Once the filter applied, AWR computes the visibility metrics for my keyword segment and time interval selected, and as a result, each graph on the report will reflect the progress for the specific data segment I’m interested in.

So, I’m seeing from the small, preview charts next to each visibility metric that I’ve been getting an ascending trend on both Visibility Score and Visibility Percent over the past month, which is good news.

But when I open up the Visibility Score chart for the high volume / low competition keyword segment I’ve been working on, it shows even clearer that we’ve got a pretty neat spike in visibility for this segment.

While this tells me that overall, I’ve got a good increase in visibility, I need to look more into the data to find out exactly what spawned the results I’m seeing.

Lower down the same report page, among a few other SEO metrics, you can find the ranking distribution metrics which show how many keywords, from the defined segment, are ranking First Place, in Top 3, 5, first page, second and third pages of results.

You can thus see, for my segment, that my increase in visibility comes from ranking improvements below the 5th position.

Track visibility for sub-segments of keyword groups

Next up, I’ll want to narrow the analysis ever more, and find out how keywords targeting a specific page (or sets of pages, depending on your strategy), but from the same high volume/low competition segment, have performed across my one month time interval.

For my project, I’ve created static groups of keywords, based on semantics:

• Keywords containing “pie”
• Keywords containing “recipe”

This enables me to mix data segmentation based on both my static keyword groups and the dynamic filter created for high volume/low competition keywords:

From the screen above, one can only hope that my optimization work from past month was not made on keywords containing “pie”.

So, while my website’s total visibility for high volume/low competition keywords has increased over the past month, it fell flat for some of my keywords.

In this case, a side by side comparison for all (or some of) my keyword groups’ visibility will help me understand how my website has performed for high volume/low competition keywords from each semantic group.

This comparison is accessible in AWR from Visibility menu > Keyword Groups.

Compare keyword segment visibility across search markets

Now let’s see what else you can do, if you track international businesses or you’re simply targeting multiple search markets, and you want to look at your keyword segment’s performance across search engines.

To access a Search Engine comparison for your AWR projects, go to Visibility > Search Engines and add/remove to the comparison the search engines you’ve been tracking on the project.

As you can see in the screenshot below, for my example, the website’s visibility for the selected keyword segment was consistently better on Google.com, both mobile and desktop, than it was on Google.co.uk.

Stack visibility progress up against competitors

And of course, you’ll also want to regularly check up on how your competitors are doing in terms of search visibility for your keyword segments, and make sure you stay on top of things.

With AWR, tracking competitors in your ranking projects does not generate additional costs for you. So you should be able to keep an eye on all your competitors’ performance and serp strategies, for the keywords you’re targeting, with no limitations.

For my example, to check and compare visibility with the competition, I’ve used the Visibility > Website report. Here you can see that I’ve managed to increase the visibility of my site so that it’s now a bit more than the visibility of one of my competitors.

That’s all for our quick visibility tracking walkthrough with Advanced Web Ranking.

If you need more info about how AWR can help you track your visibility, need help with your keyword segmentation setup or have any questions for us, just drop us a note below. Would be happy to hear your thoughts on this.

And if you want to check out these dynamic visibility filters for your own keywords, why not sign up for a trial? It’s got all the features in AWR and it’s free for the first 30 days.

You will now have more flexibility in slicing your data so that it answers all your key questions, regardless of how specific they are.

In a nutshell, you will love this AWR update since you’ll be able to:

• Combine multiple filtering conditions and customize data thresholds
• Dynamically group keywords by performance
• Save filter combinations in your filter library

Fully flexible complex filters

With the new filters we’ve added, there are literally countless data segments you can create, based on semantics or keyword performance.

In this article we’ll go through a few examples to see how the filters perform and highlight some of the filter combinations you’ll likely want to use sometime in your work.

So, to start using the new filters you’ll need to head over to Ranking > Keywords, where you’ll see all the filters available at the top of your data table.

Tip: Filters become available once the data columns are included in the report, so make sure to add to the data table any columns you may need to filter your keyword data by.

Custom data intervals

The first great thing you’ll notice about the new filters is that you can actually set your own value intervals to segment your keyword data by, which makes it extremely easy to create filters that are applicable to the specific values you’re seeing for your various projects.

Moreover this allows you to create both fine-grained data segments, as well as to isolate large keyword data intervals, depending on the type of analysis you’re performing.

With these new filtering capabilities, you’re no longer limited to the default rankings changes filters that were available up until now for AWR reports, you can make new better ones, more insightful and more in-tune with your clients’ SERP performance.

For example, you can filter by:

• Major ranking changes: Keywords that moved up or down by a specific number of positions
• New entries in SERPs: Keywords newly added in SERP on the top page or, even better, on first “x” positions
• Ranking changes for strategic terms: Keywords ranking in a specific interval (first positions, first page, second page, etc) that have dropped or changed their position dramatically
• Gained visibility for 2nd page keywords: Keywords that went up from the 2nd page
• Lost visibility for top page keywords: Keywords that went out of the 1st page
• and so on.

Filter by multiple data sources

In addition to ranking changes, you can use lots of other criteria to segment keyword data by, not just the keywords’ ranking performance: metrics from Google Search Console, metrics from AdWords Keyword Planner, filter by type of SERP features or by keyword semantic.

The best insights emerge though when you combine these dimensions together into complex filtering structures. Take these filter combinations for example:

• Prospect keywords, with high search volume for which rankings have gone up
• Important keywords, with a considerable amount of impressions that went down
• Keywords for which you own SERP features, that went up/down in rankings, or even dropped, or were just added to the SERP

Filters library

Another thing that you’ll absolutely love about the new filters, is that once you defined your filter combinations, you can simply save them into your library and access them whenever you need with just one click.

The filters you save will be accessible from all your AWR projects, so there’s no need to recreate them every time, and can be managed really easy right from the filter library:

Mix custom filters together

Sometimes though, creating very complex and super specific filters for all your analysis needs, also means having a quite large list of saved filters to manage, which may become troublesome for big projects.

For that matter another option may be to only save the wider custom filters you create and have them working together to achieve the same result as a very specific one.

For example, instead of creating four specific filters for:

• Keywords with high number of impressions and 2nd page rankings that went up to the first page
• Keywords with high number of impressions and 3rd page rankings that went up to the first page
• Keywords with high number of impressions and 4th page rankings that went up to the first page
• Keywords with high number of impressions and 5th page rankings that went up to the first page

you can only create and save one custom filter for your top performing keywords (high number of impressions, that have current position on the 1st page of results), and combine it at a time with: previous rankings were on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th page and so on.

Dynamic keyword grouping

Complex filters can also serve you to dynamically group keywords by their performance. For example, you can easily identify:

• Low-hanging keyword opportunities -> filter 2nd page keywords with high number of impressions
• Prospects for winning SERP features -> filter 1st page keywords for which key interest SERP feats appear but are not won by your website
• Prospect keywords -> filter high volume terms you have very little impressions for, and low ranking
• Top keywords -> filter by top rankings and high everything

Once you apply the filters, you will get a fresh list of all the keywords that match the conditions set, for the current date selected.

Or if you prefer, you can also create static keyword groups based on your filtered results, by selecting all keywords after applying the filters, and then assigning to keyword groups.

Being able to group keywords by performance and then track their evolution as a group is one of the things we are aiming to improve in the following weeks at AWR.

In this process, your feedback is fundamental. You will have many suggestions for us, I’m sure, once you’ll give this feature a go, so please drop us a line and let us know what would make your work easier.

Ranking Comparisons

Lastly, you’ll be able to see the value of the new filtering system when side-by-side comparing keyword performance for different search markets or between you and your competitors (the reports available in Comparison menu).

Here are a couple of great filtering examples for these reports:

• Check if keyword ranking drops are consistent across all the SEs you’re focusing on (Comparison menu > Search Engines panel; apply Changes filter, with all targeted SEs added on display).

Additionally you can narrow your analysis down to only the top ranking keywords (using the Position filter) or focus on the terms with the highest search volumes (Searches filter).

• Research the keywords for which your competitors perform best (Comparison menu > Website panel; apply Position filter and sort ascending by the competitor you wish to focus on).

Furthermore you can limit your research to the list of terms with the highest potential of driving search traffic and the best Search volumes (Searches filter).

Check it out

This is a lot to explore and a great opportunity to set new ideas in motion. Log into your account to start using the features with your data, and reach back with your feedback and comments. We’d love to hear from you.