How to Read the SEMrush Metrics – Position Tracking

This is an Accelerator Websites support video explaining our SEO Dashboard, SEMrush. I want to explain the “Position Tracking” metric. It is the second square that you’re going to see after you’re logged into your SEMrush account under your domain.

So there is a percentage here. It’s never going to be 100%. It’s probably going to be somewhere around 5-10%. If it’s higher than that, then you’re doing very, very well. Let me explain how the percentage is really not that important, but how this is a very important piece to look at. Click into the Overview section located in the second tab. They just added the Landscape section and it’s really not valuable at all in my opinion.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of this page where it says rankings overview. Now typically you’re going to have more than one key word listed here. In this example, for our website, acceleratornewsletters.com, we’re going after this keyword series: “Client Newsletters for Accountants.” We’re actually ranking number one for it, which is why we got 100%. If we added more keywords here, that percentage would go down unless we have the number one spots on everything that we keyed in.

What’s important here is to take a look at what we’re measuring for you, and if it’s in line with the type of clients that you want and in line with the geography that you think is the best chance for us to get you clients. So that’s very, very important because typically you’re going to have a city and a state listed here, and then you’re also going to have something like either Tax Prep or QuickBooks Bookkeeping or Accounting Services or CPA Firm. Those are the ones that we kind of go after the most. This chart will tell you what position you have currently in the dashboard. So if we were going to go to Google and we keyed in, for example, “Client Newsletters for Accountants,” you should be able to see roughly the same result we see in SEMrush. There may be some differences, but here we’ve got some people running ads because they can’t get their organic high enough, and then you’ve got us right here in the number one spot. You want to make sure that this is the same as or very similar to what you’re actually seeing when you key your search terms in Google and you can verify that.

Again, there may be some differences. In this case, we do have a geography, but it’s the United States in general. Typically for clients, you’re going to have a more restricted area. You’re going to have your city or your county where you’re located, because local SEO is very, very important. If we tried to rank you nationally, it would cost five figures and up per year for us to keep you ranked nationally versus locally. So we definitely want to get you in the search engines locally.

All right, so I hope that explains a little bit about ranking and the words that we’re tracking. If the keywords are not what you’re expecting, feel free to get on my calendar or give us a call and let us get the correct words in your dashboard so that we can measure at the results that you want.