Do you want to be on top of your search engine results page outside of people googling for your brand name? The coveted ten spots on the first page of Google Results are hotly contested.

It’s the whole reason why SEO exists in the first place. Winning in the battle for visibility. Every brand starts with keyword research and monitoring.

What Is Keyword Monitoring?

Keywords are the DNA of any SEO strategy.

Without keywords, you’re shooting the dark and hoping for the best. That’s why you monitor the keywords you use. You check where you rank for each one. Which keywords bring in traffic. The keywords that are incredibly hard to compete for top positions for. Monitoring keywords shows you where you should put your energy and resources and what keywords you can keep, but not really prioritize.

Monitoring is also a safety net because just because you’re in a leading position doesn’t mean you are cemented at the top. You can just as easily fall off the first page as it was to get there.

SEO focuses on performance above all else, but there are also additional benefits to a brand.

How Can It Help A Brand?

Track your Brand Mentions

You should always monitor branded keywords. Most customers won’t tag a business online when they talk about it. This applies to both positive and negative conversations. Therefore, it’s best that you keep an eye on how people react to your products and marketing outside direct mentions. This opens the door to better customer support (it’s best you reach out, even when you’re not directly mentioned) and product research.

Keep Track of your Competition

As you’ll see with the tools we’ve selected, competition research is integral to the success of your SEO strategy. There are two dimensions to this type of keyword monitoring:

•       You’re able to see where your competitors succeed and what openings they’ve left for you. Depending on how big the competitor is, you can extrapolate how hard it’s going to be to unseat them from leading positions.
•       You can better understand the customers’ attitude towards their products and services.

Know What People Talk About

This applies to the non-branded keywords, you monitor. These might be products, features or even phrases asking for recommendations. Such keyword monitoring reveals the changing attitudes of your target audience, what they expect from your products and what they find unsatisfactory.

These broader conversations additionally help shape up emerging trends, which can be a welcome opportunity for your company to step in and claim a newly formed niche.

5 Ways To Monitor Keywords

Inoreader

You might not think about an RSS feed reader as a viable option for keyword monitoring, but you are in for a surprise. Inoreader’s integration with Google Alerts and most social media platforms makes it possible to follow brand mentions and discussions surrounding your industry. Inoreader might not give you tangible data about keyword volumes and difficulty levels, but it’s excellent to mine information and discover new trends.

Inoreader has one of the most well-developed content discovery tools on the market and boasts a well-rounded Chrome browser extension, which further simplifies your browsing experience.

Online Free Tools

Although for best results, I advise you to look into paid tools (annual plans actually reduce the cost of the tool in the long run), small businesses can get their start with free-to-use tools. Sure, they’re basic. They still get the job done. Every young SEO professional will sooner or later cross paths with Google Search Console. Since Google dominates the search industry, there’s quite a lot to be said about the quality of data you receive for CTR, average position, ranking, and a total number of clicks.

Another tool that won’t impact your spending is Ubersuggest. It’s robust, simple to use, and is very reliable in terms of keyword volume, suggestions, and insight into competitor keyword usage. What makes Ubersuggest desirable is how well it suggests content around your target keywords.

Ahrefs

What’s special about Ahrefs is their versatility. This Singapore-based company understands what the current standards and processes in SEO are and delivers a comprehensive service, which creates a holistic approach to your SEO strategy. Of course, we can go off and discuss every single tool like the rank tracker, but we’ll focus on keyword tracking.

The main selling point is the Keywords Explorer. As the name suggests, you tap into a databank with thousands of keyword suggestions, SERP overview, and volume data for 10 different search engines. Everything is regularly updated on a monthly basis. You can track your previous positions and see your growth throughout time.

Moz

You might want to choose Moz Pro not only for its comparative affordability to Ahrefs, but because it comes from the duo behind what SEO looks like today – Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig. Moz embraces the all-in-one format padded additionally with the useful PDF reporting, which utilizes drag-and-drop modules to your advantage.

The keyword explorer is a little bit simpler. You can still determine what keywords are your best bet by looking into difficulty metrics and other relevant factors revealed by keyword volumes. You can also save lists of keywords and update them when you see fit.

I also find that the site crawl function is very handy as you have an automated scanning tool that evaluates site performance and flags potential issues that can hinder search engines from crawling your site.

Serpstat

Serpstat’s claim to fame is its sheer volume of essential tools to today’s SEO specialist. The last time I counted, it’s over 30 – not a bad investment, if you’re short-staffed and need to work smarter on your SEO. Serpstat helps users collect semantics, check backlinks, create a content plan for their blog and track site ranking worldwide.

About the keywords. Serpstat checks all essential boxes. Need to learn all keyword options along with similar keywords to what you’re looking into? Want to know how competitive they are? What is their difficulty level? All of this and an overview of your competitors’ best keywords.

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