Enter PRT’s new ranking charts: The ideal way to track an SEO campaign

Tracking your search engine ranks can feel like tracking the stock market, as you look for rising trends and those lines on the graph going up. While there’s little you can do to influence the stock market, your ranks are dependent on your own efforts and SEO strategy. Rank tracking is a core element, as always, and one of the best ways to see a rank’s journey is with a visual representation like a chart. Today we will do a full walkthrough on PRT’s visual rank tracking.

The Trend Column

The fastest, easiest way to view a term’s rank over time is via the Trend column in the main data table:

Trend shows changes in the term’s rankings over a month. This allows for a quick overview of the general trends, but the real beauty happens when you click the Term column and expand to see the full graph:

The key elements to take note of, as marked in the pic:

1. Choose your time span – The expanded graph shows a lot more detail. Choose the date range you want the graph to show: 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or the entire history of the rank since tracking began. The more you zoom out (in choosing a longer span of time), the broader picture you will see.
2. Full history of changes – SEO is a highly dynamic game. It’s influenced by both strategy and external events (such as Google updates, viral outbreaks of trending keywords, a possible Google penalty, plus countless other triggers). As your campaign progresses and the ranks rise and fall, the accumulated data will need to be analyzed and understood. Luckily, with PRT your data will be saved from the moment tracking for a term began, and it will always be available for you to look at. Compiled historical data is actually one of the 4 industry standards of ranking reports. The other 3 are in our full article:
   

   The 4 Golden Principles of an Industry-standard SEO Ranking Report

3. Instant download – For a quick resend to a client or to maintain copies on hard drive or server, the graph can be instantly downloaded as a PNG, JPEG, PDF or SVG file.
   
   
   Show/hide labels will toggle whether the bullets show numbered ranks or not:
   

   The same graph, only with detailed ranks on each bullet

4. Notes – The little exclamation mark reveals any notes that were entered for that particular date for that rank:
   Notes can be added to every term, and to any date, by clicking the little pen icon on the data table:
   

   This will bring out the main notes console:
   

   One of the richest tool combinations is PRT’s notes feature plus its charts. Let’s take a look at what that means. For example, if you know of an upcoming Google update, you can make a note of that. In the future, you’ll be able to reference the note and analyze the chart to see how your ranks were influenced. Let’s say you run a bitcoin authority blog. By adding a note on a date when Bitcoin values crashed, it might correlate to a keyword (such as “should I sell my bitcoins?”) suddenly rising in rank. The ability to look back and compile the data you need is your easy button for understanding correlations between strategy, real world events and ranking changes. Notes are a bonus for communication between team members working together on a campaign, too.

Multiple Terms Graph

PRT’s graph feature allows you to compare multiple tracked terms in a single graph. Any of the terms that you track can be compared:

Yikes! Too much visual data? You can switch on/off the terms that are shown by clicking on them:

Some possible comparisons you can make using the graph:

• You already know Google shows different search results to mobile users, but Big G also ranks mobile-friendly websites better on their mobile search index. See if your website ranks differently between desktop and mobile.
• Compare how different keywords progress for the same webpage. See which keywords rank higher than others so you can work on figuring out why.
• Google might rank websites differently based on different devices such as Android vs. iPhone. With this comparison, you can spot any differences and optimize your website accordingly. Certain brands need to know how they rank across every type of device.
• Compare how a term behaves across different search engines. Are you doing SEO for Yahoo! and Bing, as well as Google? Track the same keyword across all the 3 major search engines.
• Compare local ranks. You will be able to see how different locations are influencing your ranks, and by staying on point, you can rank high in the locations that matter.
• If you track your competitors, you can see how you measure up against them for any of the terms.

Any comparison that you can think of can be made here. It allows the ultimate flexibility and is limited only by your creativity.

YouTube, Amazon, and other search engines

The examples in the screenshots only show Google ranks, but PRT can also accurately track and graph other search engine ranks such as YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex. Every SEO campaign for every search engine will benefit from a graph of a term’s progress.

Dynamic data tables

The important thing to know about our data tables, is they provide you with all the ranking data that’s relevant and required for SEO in 2018. If you’re not familiar with PRT’s dynamic data tables, you can read the full breakdown here:

The SEO ranking data your SERP tracker must show you in 2018

Update frequency

A term’s ranking journey can be quite volatile, depending on the type of website you run and how popular it is.

A major contributing factor to the volatility is Google’s intent to crawl as many websites as it can as frequently as it can. The only reason you’re able to spot the volatile nature of some ranks at all is due to a high update frequency.

If you’re doing things correctly, Google will regularly crawl your site. Highly visited sites can get crawled as often as every few seconds! This is why you must have the ability to see your most current ranks.

Sudden changes in your ranks, from any cause, must be intercepted on time. Is your SERP tracker’s update frequency high enough to handle Google’s frequent ranking changes?

PRT makes sure to update your ranks every day and up to 3 times on demand, giving you the freshest ranks you can get! To read more about the importance of having fresh ranks and a SERP tracker with a high update frequency in 2018:

SEO’s life monitor: Why you absolutely must know about your SERP tracker’s rank update frequency

Graph Accuracy

Bluntly speaking, frequent updates are useless without accuracy. We all know that when Google suddenly drops a huge algorithm update bomb, the entire SEO world trembles. But what many don’t know is that Google updates their ranking algorithms ALL THE TIME. We’re talking about micro-updates that happen on a daily basis, from subtle markup changes to bigger code changes. If the SERP tracker you use doesn’t have a method to constantly monitor those changes and provide quick responses, you will get a false rank reading.

PRT is always monitoring Google and responding to any changes that happen in real time, which is why we stand behind our 100% accuracy rates. We know that to run a successful SEO campaign, you need to see the most accurate ranks you can get! Check out our full article about accuracy, where we expose some of the mechanisms rank trackers don’t want you to know:

Why are some SERP trackers more precise than others?

The Daily Progress Reports

Once you’ve accumulated some ranking progress on an SEO campaign and you have something to show your clients, it’s time to generate an in-depth Daily Progress Graph Report and impress them with a visual representation of their data. You simply choose the URL you want to generate the graph for, and decide what data you want shown with the filter:

After clicking ‘Next’ you will see all the data that you chose for that URL, arranged in progress charts along with some additional data:

The key differences between the Daily Progress Report and the Trend:

1. The progress report has a stats box – a quick macro overview of the general status of the URL’s rankings
2. You can choose any date range on the progress report (instead of a fixed range).
3. You can create a multiple Terms Graph as well, but only for terms that are being tracked for that URL.
4. In the progress report, you can edit or add any notes that exist for a term.
5. The report has a day-by-day breakdown of the ranks arranged in a data table.

Once you review the data and make any necessary edits, you can generate the report.

The report can be downloaded as a PDF, CSV or a XLSX file. Uploaded to Dropbox or Google Drive, and of course, emailed directly to your clients or colleagues.

A typical report will look something like this PDF sample.

The beauty of the Daily Progress Report, other than an aesthetic visual appeal, is high clarity with high signals and little noise. Since just about anyone can understand a chart, it’s a much friendlier approach to sending SEO progress reports than just a data table full of details. Not to mention, everyone loves seeing a rising graph!

Live Online Daily Progress Graph Shared Reports

This is one of PRT’s premium white-label features and one of the best solutions to easily show reports to clients and look professional. PRT can simply create a unique link that you can share with anyone, and instead of sending a Daily Progress Report, the link will host the same ranking data online. This solution has some major benefits:

• It saves you the need to generate files or emails.
• Client convenience – the link is always up and visible whenever the client needs it.
• The webpage is live! It’s updated at least once a day with fresh ranking data, making it a view-only extension of your main PRT account for your clients to review.
• Advanced filtering – you decide exactly what and how much data you want to show.
• A more in-depth review for your clients – the shared report also shows the terms you chose in PRT’s main data table.
• Clients can download the data files from the link as PDF, CSV or XLSX.
• White label – you can customize the page to show your company’s logo instead of PRT!
• The shared report can also be parked on YOUR domain.
• You can encrypt the page with a password and protect your client’s data.
• Set an expiration date up to 100 days in the future.

Here is a live sample. Go ahead, give it a try! Password is ‘robocop’.

This is just one of PRT’s white label solutions for SEO professionals and agencies. You can read all about the advantages of white label features and how you can use them to grow your SEO business, in our full article about the subject:

The Amazing Value of White Label Solutions for SEOs

A rank may rise and fall wildly, but the important thing is that there are long-term gains, and that if you reach a good top10 position, most of the time you stay there.

As long as you have the full historical data of a rank, an accurate rank tracker with high update frequency, and wisely placed notes that shine a light on any key points and events that happened, you will always have a clear picture and will be better able to analyze your SEO campaigns.

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PRT is a SERP tracker trusted by over 50,000 SEO experts all over the world. We are an SEO-centered tool, and we will always provide you with fresh, accurate ranks to help you stay ahead of the competition. With the highest rank-tracking resolution on the market, we can track virtually all of the local Google ranks on the planet and every rank type that is required for SEO in 2018. We also have the best price per term, and you can’t go wrong with this FREE PLAN for you to try, so you can finally see real ranks for your website.

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