When adding new pages to your website or optimising existing content for SEO, you might (and should) wonder: “is this content working?” 

To answer that question, we need to pin down what exactly we mean by ‘working’. From an SEO perspective, we could ask if the new copy is doing well on:

1. Keyword Performance: is the content ranking better on search engine results pages (SERPs) than it was before?
2. Visibility: is more of your target audience seeing your content on SERPs?
3. Clickability: are more of your target audience clicking on that content from SERPs (and going on to convert from there)?

In this article I’ll explain the difference between the three, which one might be most important for your business, how to monitor each of them effectively, how to report those findings to other stakeholders and, finally – if they’re falling short – how you can give each of them a boost.

Tracking Keyword Rankings and Performance

Keyword rankings might be the most intuitive metric of the lot. If someone’s searching for relevant keywords, do they find your content? 

If you’ve written a blog explaining SaaS, you’ll want people to see it when searching questions like “What is SaaS?”. So, monitoring the SERP rankings for that query is a good first step – have you made the first page of results?

How to check and track keyword rankings

This is something I’ve touched on previously when talking about how to check if your overall SEO needs some love. 

If you want to spot-check whether your content is ranking for a certain keyword, you can search for the query yourself, but be warned: this will not give you a clear picture of how your page is doing when someone in your audience is doing the searching. Search engine results are hyper-personalised to the searcher: language, location, device, browsing history and more will all impact which results somebody sees – it’s unlikely that any two SERPs look the same. 

To get a better, more objective view of how your content is performing on search engines, you can find ‘real’ data (more on that in a moment) on Google Search Console, or averaged data on SEO tools like SEMRush.

Using Google Search Console to track actual keyword performance

Google is where most searches happen – Google Search Console (GSC) collects that data, giving you an insight into how users find and interact with Google search results. Instead of just seeing how well you rank for a specific target keyword, you can use GSC to see the average rank that your website – or a specific page – appears at for queries it ranks on. People might find you in unexpected ways – finding out how they do might lead you to a new niche, or give you a nudge on future content topics.

You can even drill into specific subsets of searchers, and answer more complex questions about your page performance. GSC gives you the option to filter by dimensions like Query, Device, and Country: going back to our SaaS blog, you could find out how many people in the UK see your page on their smartphone when searching queries that contain “software as a service”.

To get an overview of every query a page ranks for, and that page’s average ranking for each one, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Performance tab on Search Console
2. Select your timeframe (it’s best to choose a period before and after a change or an update, to see the effect it’s had)
3. Click “+ Add filter” then “Page”, and filter for “Exact URL” using the URL of the page you want to look into
   1. [If you want to look at a specific country or device type, add those filters in here too]
4. You’re all set! Now check the “Average Position” view on the Performance Graph

Once you’re there, you’ll be able to see the top queries your page appears for, and their average position for each search. Remember that the “average position” of your page for a given query is a measure of how ‘high’ your page typically ranks on a Google search for that query. Lower numbers are better: an average position under 10 suggests your content usually appears on the first page of search results.

Pros and Cons of GSC Keyword Tracking

Pros: 

• Real data based on actual users and SERPs is much better than one person’s unrepresentative results
• Looking at real results might tell you that searchers are finding you in unexpected ways
  • To use myself as an example: my previous blog, “How do you know if your SEO is working?” has an average rank of 30 for the query “how can you tell if your SEO has been damaged”. It’s related to my topic, but not fully covered, so I’m writing a section that answers that question in more detail for those searchers 
• Free to access!

Cons:

• There’s no automated tracking: you’ll need to re-input your filters every time you want to check in on your keyword performance
• No context: you can’t look at the other results on a given SERP, so it’s difficult to figure out which pages from competitors are outperforming you

Using SEMRush to track keyword rankings over time

So, Google Search Console is great for seeing real data about how your site ranks, but it falls short when you want to keep tabs on target keywords and your page’s performance for them over time. 

You also can’t take a look at the competition: if I have an average ranking of 9 for a keyword, it’d be helpful to know which websites and what content I need to overtake! 

SEO tools like SEMRush, on the other hand, allow you to upload lists of keywords that they’ll then track over time – including not just your search rankings, but also those of your competitors.

SEO tools simulate the average search engine results page for a query based on many instances of that SERP. While you can just input the keyword you’d like to check your ranking for in the “Keyword Overview” tab, I’d recommend using the “Position Tracking” feature for a more comprehensive analysis, as that’s how you can unlock the long-term tracking functionality GSC lacks.

Using SEMRush’s Position Tracking tool

First things first, we’ll need to set up some tracking:

• Set up a project for your website, enter your domain
• Open the project, and click “Set up” in the Position Tracking Section. Specify which search engine, device type and location you’d like to monitor
• Enter a list of your target keywords, and click “Add keyword to campaign” 
• When you’re happy with your list, click “Start Tracking”

For now, the list will auto populate with today’s data. New rankings will be added every day, and after a while, you’ll get a picture of how keyword rankings are changing over time.

To monitor how your competition performs for your target keywords, navigate to the “Settings” menu at the top right-hand corner of SEMRush and click “Added competitors”. As you might have guessed, that’s where you can add competitors’ domains: SEMRush will report which of their pages rank for your tracked keywords, so you can keep an eye on their activity over time, too.

You might not check SEMRush every day, but you also don’t need an email about every ranking change. Click “Triggers” to open up the Alert settings: here, you can set rules around what you receive notifications for. Entering and Leaving the top 10 are default alerts, but you might want to add an alert for drops or gains of 10 or more rankings too, either to rectify sudden falls or to share quick wins with stakeholders!

Using Tags to create Keyword Groups

You might be targeting more than one keyword on your new blog. You may have written several blogs as part of a content marketing initiative, and want to keep track of all the keywords you’re targeting for it. You may have even become interested enough in your SEO that you’ve mapped keywords to different parts of your site, and want to monitor how each site section is performing!

Keyword groups are your friend here. Grouping multiple keywords with tags can help you assess from a glance how different types of content on your site are performing. 

Note: you’ll need a “Guru” subscription or higher to use keyword groups.

How to use Tags for effective keyword grouping 

Say you write regularly for a sustainability blog and cover three main topics: environmental, social, and economic affairs. If each blog post targets a particular keyword, instead of simply entering them all into SEMRush’s Position Tracking, you could tag the environmental-focused keywords with an “Environmental” tag, social keywords with “Social” and economic keywords with “Economic”. Now you’ll be able to hone in on particular sets of keywords to see how they’re performing.

And there’s a lot more potential for keyword tagging than just monitoring individual topics. You can give one keyword multiple tags, so why not create keyword groups for the many different ways of dividing your content? Tags can be added or removed at any point, so feel free to create new keyword groups down the line too.

Examples of keyword tags

Perhaps one of the blog posts you write about sustainability targets the keyword, “environmental protection act”, which would clearly belong to the “Environmental” topic. But how about these: that keyword is unbranded (that is, it doesn’t include your business’ name), it’s connected to a page within your blog section (as opposed to say, the services or contact sections), and is aimed at the awareness stage of the customer lifecycle. 

These three italicised words would make useful tags for insightful keyword groups: you could compare unbranded keywords against branded, blog-targeting keywords against your product- or case study-targeting ones, or awareness-stage keywords with consideration- and decision-stage queries, to see which parts of your site need more optimisation!

Pros and Cons of SEMRush

Pros:

• Can quickly and easily look at keyword rankings over time
• Can track data beyond your own site’s
• Position Tracking Alerts can save you time in monitoring keyword rankings, and notify you if you need to take action
• Power user features like keyword groups allow you to do more scalable reporting

Cons:

• The free subscription only lets you track 10 keywords, so you’ll need to add more to be able to tag them

Tracking the Visibility of your content

It’s almost impossible to track all the possible search queries which people might use to find your content: there’s too much variance in how queries can be phrased to ever build a comprehensive list. For a blog explaining what virtual reality is, would likely readers search for “virtual reality”, “what is virtual reality”, “VR explained”, or something totally different when looking for a definition? The answer is all of them, and more.

However, not all queries are created equally – some searches will end at the results page, others will lead to more clicks. Keyword search volume, the expected click-through rate of different SERP rankings, the inclusion of SERP features and more all affect how effective your ranking search results are. 

For proper SEO reporting, showing an improvement in rankings isn’t enough. Your average ranking may have climbed from 100 to 20, but that just means Google is willing to put it in a higher position. To keep stakeholders happy you still need to prove that your audience is seeing your content.

Google Search Console: Impressions

As Google Search Console uses real search data, let’s return there to find out how many people actually see your content on SERPs. For GSC, Impressions are a measure of when your search result is included in the rankings of a search, and the searcher sees it. In other words, it is a running count of the number of times that somebody has actually seen your page on Google. If your page appeared on a SERP, but the searcher didn’t scroll far enough to see it, it wouldn’t count as an impression.

Return to your GSC performance tab, still filtering to your page: are impressions to that page increasing? Or – since we’re specifically interested in performance for your target keywords – are impressions of that page stemming from your target keywords increasing?

You can filter for a cluster of related searches around a certain topic by identifying common “seed” phrases within your target keywords and filtering for those. Take this blog: my target keywords are “track SEO performance”, “how to track keywords”, and “how to monitor SEO performance”. I can take two seed phrases out – “track keywords” and “SEO performance” – and set up a filter to capture searches including either of these phrases.

Try it out for yourself:

• Navigate to the Performance tab
• Click the Impressions view
• Then click “Filter”, then “Query”. You have two choices depending on whether you want to look at impressions for:
  • JUST target keywords: click “Custom (regex)” and search for queries that matches regex “Target keyword 1|Target keyword 2|….”
  • All queries around a seed phrase: as above, but search for queries that matches regex “Seed keyword 1|Seed keyword 2| …”

A slightly unwieldy process, as you still can’t input lists of keywords, as you might on other SEO tools. It’s worth it, though, to get an unobscured view of your content’s real-world reach. It’s also the best way to see the tangible impact of earning better rankings: that is, more people actually see the content!

SEMRush: Visibility (And Share of Voice)

Hop back to SEMRush for this next bit. If you’ve set up a Position Tracking report, you’ll notice your Project already includes a measure of “Visibility”: it’ll be between 0% and 100%. SEMRush’s Visibility metric is essentially a measure of how well you perform for your tracked keywords – but crucially it goes beyond measuring the average rank. How? By taking into account the clickthrough rate (CTR) of different rankings. 

Think of it not as a measure of how high your page ranks across all your tracked keywords, but a measure of how often your site is the answer people click on when searching those keywords: a better-ranked page for a given keyword is more likely to be one people see, but there are additional factors that make people actually click through.

Difference from Average rank

It can be hard to understand the difference between average rank and visibility: think of it like this. 

Imagine you’re looking to buy a new pair of trainers, and search “best running shoes”. Do you click on the first result? Most of the time, that’s what the average searcher will do. If you don’t click the first result, it’s most likely that you’ll click the second result instead, and so on. Most people never get past the first page of SERPs: a higher-ranked page is disproportionately likely to be clicked on, and the visibility metric accounts for that. 

Advanced Web Ranking have studied the click-through rate (CTR) of different rankings on Google’s SERPs – you’ll see that the top 10 results earn about 80% of all click-throughs. It’s worth noting this’ll vary by query and searcher, so all the figures are averages.

As of February 2025, ranking 1st for a query would net my page a 41.09% CTR (on average), while ranking 20th would mean a CTR of just 0.25% (again, on average).

With this in mind, if I targeted 10 keywords for a blog, I might rather have nine keywords not rank at all and one keyword at rank 1 than rank 20th for all my keywords! Why’s that? Imagine that there were 100 searches for each of those 10 keywords. 

In the case where I rank 20th for every keyword, I could expect 100 x 10 x 0.0025 = 2.5 clicks, let’s say 3 to be generous. On the other hand, although I’d expect 0 clicks from nine keywords in the first case, that keyword where the blog ranks first would earn me 100 x 0.41 = 41 clicks, which is more than thirteen times the amount of expected traffic!

I hope you can see why going beyond pure rankings and looking at additional factors makes more sense now, when our goal is to translate SEO optimisation into actual traffic from our audience.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice (SOV) goes one step further than Visibility: instead of just taking the expected CTR of your ranking positions into account, it uses the keyword volume of your tracked keywords to estimate your expected traffic from your tracked keywords – scaling searches’ importance by how often they actually get searched. 

It then compares your expected traffic against that of your competitors: the percentage of that traffic that belongs to you is your Share of Voice for those keywords.

SOV is a more powerful metric than visibility, as it can help you understand the impact of each individual keyword: long-tail keywords with a lower keyword difficulty (but also a lower search volume) are important in any SEO strategy, but SOV can give you a measurable sense of the rewards of getting a page up to rank one on a tougher, more common keywords. 

Ranking first for two keywords, one with 100 searches/month and one with 10,000 searches/month (using our 41.09% CTR for rank 1 from above) would result in different amounts of expected traffic from each keyword. We would expect 41 users in the first case, and 4,109 in the second: putting in the effort to earn a ranking for the tougher, higher-search volume keyword could definitely be worth it if that keyword fits your SEO strategy!

One quick caveat: SEMRush’s Share of Voice tool is only available in their Business tier, which is pretty pricey… However, you can calculate it yourself: it’s quite complex, and not for everyone, so I’ll include that method at the end of this blog instead of right here. Click here to find out how to calculate share of voice.

Analytics

The final piece of the puzzle! So far, you’ve been able to see whether your page is ranking (using GSC’s average ranks), follow how those rankings are changing over time (with SEMRush’s position tracking), and work out how many people are actually seeing your pages (through Impressions on GSC or Visibility and SOV on SEMRush).

If that’s all looking positive, you could feasibly go back to stakeholders and say, “Yes, our content is working!”, But that isn’t telling the whole story, and you’re stopping short of measuring the real value of SEO – organic traffic. That’s people who end up on your site of their own accord, not through paid placements.

You need to be able to tie your content and SEO efforts to your wider business objectives: are you attracting organic traffic with your new and updated articles, do those visitors like what they see enough to stick around on your site, and are they actually going on to do business with you as a result? Let’s find out.

Google Search Console

Let’s return to that Performance tab one last time! Now we want to look at the other two metrics on that view, clicks and click-through rate.

The question is simple, but one that’s often overlooked when people talk about SEO: when users are presented with a link to your content on a results page, do they actually click on it? 

Clicks are just that: how many times a user has clicked on a search result for your page. The click-through rate is the number of clicks you receive for a certain page or query, divided by the number of people who saw it (impressions): that tells you what proportion of users click on your page once they’ve seen it on Google’s SERP.

As mentioned previously, search result rankings closer to 1 have a significantly higher average CTR: but that’s not to say you can’t sway users to your results from lower spots! Enticing your audience with a well-crafted page title and meta description can hook them in, going a long way in earning each and every click through to your page.

Google Analytics

Finally, a different tool! Google Analytics (GA) can go one step further than GSC by monitoring the actual traffic to your site from all sources, not just Google. What’s more, it’s here where you can measure conversions – how many people go on to choose and pay for your services. Now you can show not only that your audience is reaching your content organically, but that the content they find is nudging them towards a sale or other conversion.

There are countless ways to navigate Google Analytics, but here’s how to get a quick look at how your page is doing in terms of organic traffic and those all-important conversions:

1. On Google Analytics, navigate to the Reports tab
2. Click the Lifecycle section to expand it, then the Engagement dropdown menu, then Landing page to open up a report about which pages users are reaching your site on
   • OR: depending on your version of GA4, you may have a different sidebar view. Instead, click the Business objectives dropdown, then Generate leads, then Landing page
3. Search for the page path of your URL, which is everything that comes after your domain (my domain is hugothomas.marketing, so the path for this page is /blog/monitoring-seo-performance)
4. Make sure you’re only looking at your organic traffic: at the top of the report click the “+” to the right of “All Users” (or just “A” on smaller screens) to add a comparison view
   • Do this: Add comparison > Create New > Session default channel group exactly matches “Organic Search”

Now you can see how many times people found your page via a search engine (the number of sessions, which might include repeat visits: you can also use “active users” to see how many people found your page via search engine).

To track conversions, you’ll need to use the Key Events column. Mark events as key events in GA’s settings, and then you’ll be able to track conversions or other key moments of the customer journey. For instance you may want to show how many organic visitors sign up for a free consultation, or download your product guide.

“I’m not happy!” Improving Keyword Ranking, Visibility, Clicks, and Conversions

By now, I hope you have a comprehensive idea of how to evaluate content from an SEO standpoint: seeing how a page ranks, how many people see it, and how and how often they actually engage with it.
If you don’t like what you’re seeing, you might be looking for some solutions. I’m afraid there are no quick fixes in the world of SEO! But there are some high-impact SEO tactics you can make (I’ll be expanding all of these in a new blog, out soon, so keep your eyes peeled):

Copywriting & Content Refreshes: a strategy for organic conversions

So, tracking SEO performance! To summarise: it can be a complex job to monitor and report how effectively your content attracts relevant traffic from search engines, but being able to demonstrate the value of your engaging and helpful content is crucial for convincing company stakeholders of SEO’s power.

If you’re looking to grow your audience, you’ll need to show up when they’re searching.  SEO and copywriting are indispensable tools in getting there – and now you know how to check if they’re working as they should! If you think you might need to make some changes to get some more eyes on your brand, I’d love to show you how.

Get in touch at [email protected], or fill out the form below, for a free one-hour consultation on anything and everything SEO.

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Appendix: How to calculate Share of Voice manually

How can you work out your website’s Share of Voice manually? This is my method that I use with clients who aren’t ready to upgrade to SEMRush’s Business tier: the results may not exactly mirror the platform’s own metrics but I find it gives an accurate, actionable insight into how your website is performing against your competitors. 

To work out your share of voice, you will first need:

• A list of competitors to compare your Share of Voice against
• A list of keywords and their monthly search volume
• Your website’s and your competitors’ websites rankings for these keywords 
• Up-to-date average CTR data from Advanced Web Ranking’s CTR Tool

Let’s first set out what “Share of Voice” (SOV) is supposed to measure within SEO. When used for marketing at large, SOV compares the size of a brand’s presence in a market compared to the brand’s competitors. When used in SEO, then, we need to define what we mean by “presence” and “market”.

“Market”

If we can understand what we mean by “market”, then it should be easier to define what it means to have a presence within that market. 

For SEO, the market I think is fairly clear: the search engine results pages. This is where different brands and websites compete to rank higher for different queries, and want to attract organic traffic. 

Still, there is one qualification to be made here. When talking about Share of Voice, we are interested in a specific type of SERP: the results pages for queries related to our brand. If a company offers gardening services, it’s not going to affect them if a competitor also offers pool installations: so including their rankings in that category will only mess up our SOV calculation.

To account for this, let’s limit the SERPs that make up our market to the SERPs for our tracked keywords.

“Presence”

If the market for SEO SOV is the SERPs, what does it mean for a brand to have a presence there? The instinctive answer is to say that pure rankings are the answer here (just like how keyword rankings might be your instinctive measure of SEO performance). However, we need to also acknowledge that different keywords have different search volumes, and that higher rankings in the SERPs have disproportionately higher click-through rates. These two factors mean that ranking highly for high-search-volume keywords will significantly boost a website’s presence.

Having one large billboard in Times Square is likely to be more effective than plastering posters across all of NYC’s back alleys: likewise for SEO, presence must mean more than just sheer quantity of rankings. How about we use the impact of those rankings instead for our definition of presence? That is, we’ll define presence as a website’s share of expected organic traffic.

Let’s break that down. Many SEO tools will provide the monthly search volume (MSV) of different keywords, which is simply the number of times that keyword is searched for in a month. From the Advanced Web Ranking study we also have the average click-through rate for different rankings on the SERP. 

To work out the expected organic traffic to your website from one keyword ranking, multiply the MSV of that keyword by the CTR of your average rank for the keyword. You might recognise this as the napkin maths I was doing in the “Difference from Average rank” section of this blog. 

Formula to work out Share of Voice

To work out the expected organic traffic to your website from multiple keyword rankings (in this case, your rankings for your tracked keywords that make up the market), repeat that calculation for each keyword, and then add the results up to get your total.

Then, you’ll need to repeat the same calculations for each competitor. Lengthy I know: Google Sheets formulae will be your friend here to auto-populate the CTR data and calculate the expected traffic (thanks be to VLOOKUP!).

After all this you should have a figure for each website – yours and your competitors’ – of the expected (monthly) organic traffic coming from your tracked keywords. The final step is to work out what percentage of that traffic belongs to you!

The formula then to work our your SEO Share of Voice percentage is:

SEO %SOV = (Total expected organic traffic for target keywords for your website ÷ Total expected organic traffic for yours and your competitors’ websites) x 100