Position Tracking (also called rank tracking or SERP tracking) lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a custom set of target keywords. You can set your targeting to watch any specific geographic location and device type (mobile phone, tablet, or desktop). The tool has many features like tagging, sorting, filtering, and exporting reports, making it easy for marketers to find exactly what they’re looking for in their website’s SEO or PPC performance.
- Ability to track any keyword and domain — even those not in the main Semrush database
- Track and compare multiple geographic locations or device types in a single project
- Featured Snippets report to look for featured snippet opportunities
- Easy local SEO tracking and local competitor discovery
- Simple PDF reporting to share results with colleagues and clients
No matter what your SEO specialty is, you could do on-page SEO, write content, build links, or run technical audits; chances are you'll have to measure the impact of your work on the website's rankings. This is especially true if your website operates in a local space since Google's results can change heavily depending on the geolocation.
Plus, as the world of mobile search only continues to grow, you're likely seeing a lot of potential traffic from mobile users. To know where your website stands on mobile and local results, Position Tracking is a must.
As you conduct your campaign, you can use Position Tracking to see how your efforts translate into ranking changes and learn which pages get the most traffic from your target keywords. You’ll be able to identify your weakest pages that need improvement and monitor your competitor’s rankings from the same place.
To help you keep up with SERP Features in your niche, Position Tracking will identify all the unique SERP Features found on the SERPs for your keywords. We also offer a report that shows your website’s opportunities to go after Featured Snippets.
The daily updates and weekly email reports will make it easy for you to prioritize work as you reach your goals promptly. Semrush makes it easy to generate data exports and clean PDFs to report your progress directly to clients if you serve clients.
In April 2019, we released a Semrush Position Tracking in the Google Play store (Android) and Apple store (iOS). The Semrush app lets you follow all your Position Tracking campaigns on the go, so you can never miss a beat in your website’s improvements.
Position Tracking will collect historical data from your campaign's creation date. We track daily results in Position Tracking for 60 days. After 60 days, we display information using weekly points; those are on Wednesdays, by default. We track this weekly information for 140 weeks.
Another benefit of running a Position Tracking campaign is that historical data can be seen for any added competitors from when your project was initially created.
For example, you created a campaign on November 1, 2020, without adding any initial competitors. Then, on November 1, 2021, you added two of your competitors to the campaign. You will see weekly data points on how those newly added competitors ranked for the keywords in your project going back to November 1, 2020.
With this data, you can watch any trends and changes in the most critical keywords in your market. The greater your perspective on the market, the more ready you'll be to beat your competitors.
Historical Data Import from External Services
If you’ve ever used another rank-tracking tool or service, you can import the historical data into your campaign in Semrush’s Position Tracking tool. This feature is only available to annual Guru and Business subscriptions.
For now, the import is available from the following services:
- MOZ
- AWR
- STAT
- RankRanger
- BrightEdge
- SE Ranking
- RankWatch
- Searchmetrics
- Linkdex
To import your historical data to Semrush, please download it from your service to .csv (UTF-8 encoded) and send it to our support team.
You must delete the whole project when you want to delete a specific tool. This will remove all of the other campaigns set up in the Project.
So let’s say you want to delete a Position Tracking campaign. When you delete the Project, you will also delete the Site Audit, Social Poster, Backlink Audit, or any other tools in that project.
Projects cannot be recovered once deleted, so it's essential to be careful when deleting a project. Only delete a project if you are 100 percent sure because your data will be gone forever.
The limits of this tool are the total number of keywords you can track across your Projects, the ability to run a campaign with multitargeting, and access to the reports: Tags, Cannibalization, and Devices & Locations.
Multitargeting allows users to gather rank-tracking data for multiple devices and locations simultaneously within the same project (for example, Desktop vs Mobile).
- Free: 10 keywords (1 Project)
- Pro: 500 keywords (5 Projects)
- Guru: 1,500 keywords (15 Projects) + access to Multitargeting, Tags report, Cannibalization, and Devices & Locations reports (10 targetings per project)
- Business: 5,000 keywords (40 Projects) + access to Multitargeting, Tags report, Cannibalization, and Devices & Locations reports (5,000 targetings per project), ability to schedule CSV and Excel exports
If you want to track more keywords than your account allows, you can reach out to your account executive or our sales team via this contact form and ask about a custom solution.
