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Adding and tracking keywords
Adding and tracking keywords
How to start adding and tracking keywords to analyze them.
Maja Nagelj avatar
Written by Maja Nagelj
Updated over a week ago

Why track keywords?

If you own a business website, you will want to track keywords that people may search in search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo), and find out which keywords are leading people to your website.

By tracking keywords, you can take steps to improve the performance and rankings of your keywords on search engines.

With Nightwatch, you can track keywords and even scrutinize the data to your liking. For example, you can filter and segment keywords into countless different categories to track, such as search engine platforms, country, language, device platform, and more.

On this page:

Adding keywords

When you log into Nightwatch for the very first time, our wizard will automatically prompt you to add your very first URL, and together with that, your first set of keywords.

You'll then need to access the specific website's keywords page to add more keywords. Here's how you can start adding subsequent keywords:

  • Within a URL dashboard, click on All Keywords at the left sidebar.

  • You will then see the blue (+) Add Keywords button towards the right side of the page; click it.

Add keywords dashboard:

⚠️ Keywords with special characters like \!@%,*{}<>; are not supported. The reason is that Google Ads API defines them as invalid and doesn't show Search Volume and Cost-Per-Click stats for them.

Adjusting keywords for multiple locations, search engines, languages, or devices

To track the same keywords but with multiple different settings, such as different locations, search engines, languages, or devices, you will need to adjust your keywords time with different settings. You can adjust all this on this page:

  • First, you enter the keywords - separately or in a batch by choosing the +Batch Add Keywords field. If adding your keywords in batch, make sure you add one per row.

  • Adjust your Location and Language — these are to determine where you would like to track your keywords and in what language. For example, if you choose France and the language is French, your keywords would be tracked in google.fr in French.

  • Optionally, set or adjust the Precise Location settings for tracking, if you would like to track your keywords locally, for example, in New York. Otherwise, the keywords will be tracked on a national level (the US in this case).

  • Choose the search engine where you want to track the rankings. By default, it is Google, but you can track rankings also in Youtube, Bing, Yahoo, and Google My Business.

  • Choose the device where you want to track your keywords - mobile devices or desktop,

  • Add Tags,

  • You can use batch actions (above the list), to adjust settings for your keywords in a batch.

  • Set up Views (filters) to organize your keywords, so that it's easier to track.

💡 Note: You will need to add keywords for different locations, search engines, languages, or devices separately because each keyword with different settings would count individually. This is because the system has to make separate queries for them, even if they are the same keywords.

For example:

  • personal attorney tracked in the US, Canada, and Australia, would count as three separate keywords.

  • Or personal attorney tracked for both desktop and mobile would count as two separate keywords.

Reading keyword data

After you've added your first keywords, you will be redirected to the specific URL's keywords page where you can view your dashboard and keywords list.

Keywords overview dashboard

With the overview dashboard, you will have an overview of your website performance:

Here are the definitions for each stat:

  • Average Position: Average position shows how your overall search rankings are improving. It is calculated as the sum of all rankings divided by the number of keywords that you’re tracking for a website. Every non-ranking keyword is shown as the lowest ranking on the scale - which is 100. Adding keywords over time will affect the average position, when you add them we re-process the historic data.

  • Under Search Visibility:

    • Indexed Pages: Indexed pages are pages scoured by search engines and deemed to have enough quality for relevant search phrases. Indexed pages will show up in search results and can drive organic traffic to your site.

    • Search Visibility: Search visibility index refers to the percentage (values between 0 and 100) of a potential conversion traffic a given keyword (or set of keywords) has based on their ranking. Each rank is given a "visibility factor" number which is used to calculate its keyword's share of potential conversions. Rank #1 is considered 100%, the rest of the ranks ratios being proportional to their average CTR values.

      CTR rates that we use for calculating click potential and search visibility:

      CTR Rates

      There are other factors involved that will affect your search visibility score:

      • Search volume,

      • Other rankings in SERP, such as feature snippets, map rankings, etc.

      Also, if:

      • The position is > 20,

        or

      • The search volume is 0

      Then the Search Visibility will be 0.

    • Click Potential: Click potential shows an estimated number of clicks you should be expecting based on your current rankings and search volume for the chosen keywords. It is a good indicator of how many clicks you should be getting when ranking on the first page of SERP.

      A certain keyword's click potential is calculated by the number of local searches for this keyword (local search volume) multiplied by an average CTR for that keyword ranking on Google.

  • Keyword Distribution: The ranks of your keywords on specific dates.

    The keyword distribution section shows you how the keywords that you track are distributed after the last update.

    For example, if you click on 'Top 3', you will see only the keywords ranking in the first 3 places on your keywords list. If you click on 'Top 10', you will see all the keywords ranking on the first 10 places and so on.

    Under the Keyword Distribution in the Overview section and your keywords list below, you see how your keywords are distributed on the current day. Therefore, if you choose date ranges like last day, last 7 days, last 14 days, last month, etc. - you will see all the keywords and their distribution on the current day.

  • Keywords Up/Down: To track which keywords went up or down on specific dates.

Keywords list and rankings

You'll find the keywords list right below the overview dashboard, with columns set up to display their ranks and performances:

Example: The first column, Rank, shows the best rank from all tracked rank types. If, for example, your Local Pack position is higher than your Organic rank, it will be selected to display:

The Last update column will let you know when our tool refreshed your rankings previously.

Note: Nightwatch will refresh your rankings on a daily basis.

Our system determines the optimal time for updating the rankings, and all rankings are refreshed on a regular daily basis, in a 24h interval.

Click here to read more about how to customize the columns, add multiple columns on your keywords table to display your preferred data: Customizing keywords columns

Check out our Graphs feature to take your data-reading to the next level: Graphs and Segmentation

Check out our tutorial video on YouTube:

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