Track keyword rankings
Follow your Google positions for the keywords that matter with the Rank Tracker: add keywords, tag them and read the charts.
The Rank Tracker follows where your site ranks in Google for the keywords you choose — per country, language and device — and shows how your visibility and estimated traffic change over time. It's the quickest way to see whether your articles and fixes are moving you up.
Add keywords
When you haven't tracked anything yet, the Rank Tracker offers the keywords your articles are aimed at, taken from your content plan. Untick the ones you don't want and click Track … keywords. To add your own:
- Open Rank Tracker and click Add keywords (on an empty Rank Tracker: Add your own keywords).
- Under Keywords, type a keyword and press Enter or a comma. Paste a list to add many at once.
- Under Locations, pick the country, an optional region and the language. Click Add Location to track the same keywords somewhere else too.
- Optionally add Tags — for example one per topic or product — to group keywords later.
- Under Devices, choose Desktop, or switch to Desktop & Mobile.
- Click Add keywords.
The line at the bottom shows how many tracked keywords you're adding: each keyword counts once per location and device. Three keywords in two locations on desktop and mobile are 12 tracked keywords. How many you can track depends on your plan — see Plans, trial and limits.
New keywords get their first position shortly after you add them; after that ProjectHQ checks them again every few days.
Read the Rank Tracker
- Filters — All, Desktop or Mobile, the date range (Last 30 days by default), Location and Keyword. More Filters adds tags, position, search volume, traffic, KD and URL. Clear filters resets them.
- Summary charts — Visibility (how close your positions are to ranking first for every keyword — 100% would be position 1 everywhere), Average position (lower is better), Traffic (estimated monthly visits from these keywords), SERP features (how many search-result features you own out of all that appear) and Position Distribution (how many keywords rank 1–3, 4–10, 11–50, 51–100 and 101+, with the number that went up ▲ and down ▼). Click a chart to open it large.
- Your domain / Competitors — switch to the competitor comparison.
- Keywords, Pages, Tags — the same data per keyword, per ranking page, or per tag.
- Add keywords.
The keyword table
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Keyword | The keyword with its device, country and language. |
| Intent | Why people search it: C commercial, I informational, N navigational, T transactional. |
| Tags | Your tags. |
| Position | Your current Google position and the change since the previous check. |
| SERP Features | Features in the search results, such as AI overviews, featured snippets or People also ask. A highlighted icon means your page owns it. |
| SV | Monthly search volume, with a 12-month trend. |
| Traffic | Estimated monthly visits from this keyword at your position. |
| GSC Impr., GSC Clicks, Google Pos. | Real impressions, clicks and average position from Google — shown when Google Search Console is connected. Google's average position is measured over all searches, so it can differ from the Position column, which is one check of the results page. |
| KD | Keyword difficulty — how hard it is to reach the top 10. |
| URL | The page of yours that ranks. |
Click Details at the end of a row to open the keyword: its search volume trend, position history, the SERP features and the full results page Google showed.
Tag, untag and delete keywords
Tick the boxes in front of keywords. A bar appears at the bottom with Add tag, Remove tag and Delete. In Add tag, pick an existing tag, or choose Create new tag, type its name and click Create. Deleting keywords stops tracking them and frees them up in your plan.
Tip: Log launches and site changes as events — they appear as flags on these charts, so you can see what caused a jump.