How to find your Google website ranking
Organic traffic is a huge contributor to a websites success, from a marketing and monetization standpoint..
All new website owners or bloggers ask the same question- how do I get more visitors to my site? While there are many answers, an equally important question to ask is: how can I tell where my website ranks on Google search results? With an average of 40,000 Google search queries happening every second, it’s foolish to not optimize a website to show up in these results (SEO). However, finding your rank in this hierarchy poses a serious problem- it’s usually inconsistent!
Google tailors search results to users based on different things including search history, use of words that are relative to search keywords, page popularity (traffic count), and more. To find one definitive page ranking for your website is basically impossible. Instead, we have to look at a series of data sources and draw our own conclusions. Using these methods below, you can actually come up with a pretty accurate estimation of how your page ranks.
Google Webmaster Tools
The Google Webmaster Tool gives us the first source of data to identify page rank. The software once offered a precise tool for page ranking, but this feature was deprecated several years ago on the grounds of misleading value- a fair decision. Now, we have to do our own data digging to draw educated conclusions.
When you access your Webmaster Console, be sure to select the proper domain (website you manage) from the left side of the page. If you’ve never used Webmaster Tools before, you’ll need to first get your domain verified and then give some time for data to populate. Select the “+ add property” option to start this process.
There are a few things that we can look at in the search analytics portion of the webmaster tool, including total clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position, all of which can be filtered by time frame. Note these results, but don’t accept them at face value, as there are other things we need to take into consideration. Scroll down and look at the other options- queries, pages, countries, etc. These metrics give us valuable insight into which pages are coming up more frequently in organic search results. Seeing any trends? If so- you might be onto something.
Google Analytics
If you track your website with Google Analytics, you can comb through various pages of data to gather insider knowledge about how your page ranks. The most effective way in my opinion is to search through your Source/Medium for google / organic. You can find this in the Acquisition > All Traffic section, or just search for it at the top left of your dashboard. Be sure to filter your results by different time frames, in order to evaluate trends- are you seeing more Google traffic in the past few days than past month? This could indicate that your latest article is getting more organic traffic than usual- nice work!
Take this information and head over to your Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages section. Filter by short and long term dates, and look at which pages are getting the most engagement. If the top pages are the same as those observed in Webmaster Tools, and correlate to the timing of recent organic traffic, then you can be confident that your page is on an upward trend and ranking higher and higher each day, in Google search results. You might consider creating more articles/webpages like that one!
Manual Testing
The final recommendation for identifying page ranking on Google is a bit old fashioned, but it's a great no B.S. way to see results. Flip on incognito mode in your browser (to remove cache related interference) and do a few Google searches for the question your web page seeks to answer. For example- this article you're reading is about finding web page ranking, so I might try searching for “how to find where my website ranks on google”.
The goal would be to have your article appear in the top few search results, on the first page of Google. If it's not, go through each page until you find it. Putting yourself in the position of a potential website visitor is a great way to optimize SEO as well as conversions. I go into more detail about this method as it relates to social media marketing funnels in this article, in case you're interested. You may wish to also read more about why social proof works, for increasing conversion.
While your exact website ranking on Google can vary, you can come to a pretty accurate conclusion of a pages effectiveness by using various analytic tools as noted above. You should also plan to watch for social media marketing trends that can infer search result performance.
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Aleksey Weyman
Aleksey Weyman is a web designer, music artist and creator of Millennial Moderator.
