# Rankings

Track keyword positions over time, watch competitors, and get alerted when something drops.

Rankings stores every position check with its date, the ranking URL and the search metrics attached to the keyword, so you can show movement rather than a single snapshot. This is usually the first tab a client asks to see, so it is worth setting up carefully rather than tracking everything the topical map suggests.

## Visible panels

- Local Grid for map-pack positions across a geographic area.
- Rankings for the tracked keyword table and position history.
- Rivals for competitor comparisons.

## What you see

- Position now, best position, and change over your selected window.
- The exact URL Google is ranking, useful for spotting the wrong page winning a term, or a blog post outranking the service page it should support.
- Distribution buckets (top 3, top 10, top 20, beyond) for reporting progress at a glance.
- Search Console history synced daily: impressions, clicks, average position and CTR per query and page.
- Competitor positions for the same keyword, when competitors are configured for the client.

## Adding keywords to track

1. **Add from Keywords.ai**: Send a cluster or individual keyword straight from the topical map, this is the most common path and keeps volume/difficulty attached.
2. **Add manually**: Type a keyword directly when a client asks about a specific phrase that was not in the map.
3. **Set the target location**: Local terms need a location so the check reflects what a searcher in that market actually sees.
4. **Confirm the target page**: If the client has a page meant to rank for the term, note it so drift is easy to spot later.

## Refresh schedule

Tracked keywords refresh automatically on a recurring job; you can also refresh on demand after a significant change such as a new page launch or a batch of approved audit tasks. Every result is stored, so history survives keyword edits and you can still see the position trend from before a keyword was renamed.

## Drop detection

A weekly anomaly scan compares recent performance with the preceding period and flags real drops, ranking losses, impression or click declines, and pages that stopped appearing. Alerts arrive in the activity feed and, if enabled, by email, so a ranking loss does not sit unnoticed until the monthly report.

> **Connect Search Console early**: Rank checks tell you where you appear. Search Console tells you what actually gets clicked. Anomaly detection is much more accurate with both.

## Worked example: reading a drop

Say "emergency plumber austin" falls from position 4 to position 11 in one week, and Search Console shows clicks for that query dropped from roughly 40/week to under 5. Check three things in order: whether the ranking URL changed (a new page may be competing with the old one), whether a recent audit task or blog publish altered the target page's title or content, and whether a competitor entered the local grid for that area. Most single-keyword drops trace back to one of those three causes.