How to check your keyword ranking on Google for free
When you first start blogging, free and budget-friendly tools are important to building a profitable journey. The good news is that there are options to help you check your keyword ranking on Google for free, and will save you time. In the future, you’ll want to explore more powerful tools.
One thing to note before going any further. If your blog is very new, Google may not have assigned any keywords yet. Don’t get discouraged. With time and additional keyword research, you should watch the progress of the keyword assignment.
Today, the two free options for checking your ranking include:
- Google Search Console
- Ubersuggest
Google Search Console is a tool that Google provides keyword ranking information along with additional features to help with indexing your blog.
Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that recently added new features to list keywords by domain, not just suggestions based on a search term you enter.
How to use Google Search Console to check keyword ranking on Google for free
Let’s take a look at Google Search Console first. This was previously called Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) and they’re in the process of moving all the features into Search Console.
Note: If you haven’t signed up for Google Search Console in the past, do that first. It will take a few days for the data about your blog to show up. In the meantime, don’t forget to submit your XML sitemap to help improve the indexing of your blog.
To check your keyword rankings in Search Console, log into Search Console and choose “Performance” in the left menu.
The initial view in the right contains all the keywords (Queries) currently assigned to your site. In the graph, click on the Average CTR and Average position to add these columns to the information table.
In the table, you’ll see columns for clicks, impressions, CTR (click-through-rate), and (average) position. All this information will give you a basic overview of how often your blog is coming up in the search.
If you click to the Pages tab, this will show you the pages that are currently assigned keywords. It’s also interesting to see the number of impressions total per page.
To check a specific blog page’s keyword ranking on Google:
- Click on a URL in the list
- Click on the Queries tab
By doing this, you filtered the Queries (aka Keywords) by the page specific page. Now you can see for that blog post (or page), which keywords are assigned to it and the average ranking.
As your blog ages and you publish more content, it’s fun to watch how many additional keywords are assigned to each page.
Tip: Use the keyword views to identify opportunities to either optimize your existing posts better (to improve rankings) AND gather ideas for new blog posts where you could deep dive on a keyword.
How to use Ubersuggest to check keyword rankings for free
Another option for checking your keyword rankings is to use Ubersuggest. You can also use this to look at the keywords some of your competitors are ranking for.
Note: Similar to Google Search Console, the data may not be available for newer blogs or websites. I checked one of my other sites and the data was available in Search Console, but not in Ubersuggest.
To start looking at keywords assigned to your blog, enter the domain name in the search box and click search.
Next click Keywords in the left menu under Traffic Analyzer.
For each assigned keyword, Ubersuggest gives an estimated traffic number as well as a calculated competitiveness/difficulty score. I take these numbers as suggestions and indications.
The difficulty of ranking for a keyword is more complex than looking at the search volume and the sites already ranking for it. And traffic volume
For traffic volume, I prefer to think about this as an indication of a high, medium, or low search volume.
Tip: For newer blogs, the lower search volume and lower difficulty keywords prove to be easier ranking opportunities.
Over to you! How are you checking the keyword positions for your blog posts?
I know it can sound like a time-consuming task or one that involves a lot of guessing. With these two tools, you can gain insight into how your blog is doing with Google for free.
Or how else are you checking for keyword positions? Have additional questions? Let’s chat!
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