I Stopped Googling Myself and Started Actually Tracking My Rankings

The ritual

Every indie maker with a blog does the same thing. You open an incognito window, type your target keyword, and scroll through Google looking for your site. Sometimes you find it on page two. Sometimes page three. Sometimes you don't find it at all and you're not sure if it's actually missing or if you just gave up scrolling too early.

You might do this for 5 or 10 keywords. If you're disciplined, you write the positions down in a spreadsheet. Next week you do it again — except you forget a few keywords, and the positions don't quite match because Google personalizes results even in incognito based on your location.

This is how most people "check their Google keyword positions." And it's almost useless.

Why manual position checking doesn't work

Three reasons:

Google lies to you. Even in incognito, results vary by location, device type, and recent search trends. A query from Stockholm shows different results than the same query from San Francisco. What you see is not what your audience sees.

You can't spot trends from snapshots. Knowing you're position 14 today means nothing if you don't know you were position 22 last month. That keyword is climbing — but you'd never know from a single check. Without history, you can't tell the difference between a keyword that's stuck and one that's steadily moving toward page one.

It doesn't scale. Checking 5 keywords takes 10 minutes. Checking 50 takes an hour. Doing this weekly? That's 4 hours a month spent Googling yourself instead of building your product or writing content. At some point the math stops making sense.

What a position checker actually gives you

An automated keyword position checker queries Google for each of your keywords on a schedule — weekly or daily — and records exactly where your domain appears. No personalization, no guesswork, no spreadsheets.

The useful data isn't just "you're at position X." It's the trend. Here's what that looks like in practice:

• A keyword moves from 45 → 28 → 19 → 14 over four weeks — it's clearly climbing, and now it's in striking distance of page one
• A keyword drops from 7 → 12 → 18 — something broke. Maybe a competitor published better content, maybe a technical issue is tanking your page
• A keyword sits at position 50 for six weeks straight — it's not moving and your content probably doesn't match the search intent

Without automated tracking, all three of these look the same: you Google your keyword, don't see yourself on page one, and feel vaguely bad about your SEO. With tracking, each one tells you something different and demands a different action.

Setting it up in unranked

Here's the actual flow. Takes about 5 minutes.

Enter your domain

After signing up, paste your domain into the setup screen. That's the only input — no configuring APIs or picking keyword lists from a dropdown.

Unranked runs automated discovery: it crawls your site, analyzes competitors ranking for similar terms, and (if you connect Google Search Console) pulls in keywords you're already getting impressions for.

Pick keywords to track

Discovery returns a list of keywords with search volume and difficulty scores. You'll see three types:

• Ranked — you already show up for these. Often includes terms you never targeted.
• Competitor — competitors rank here but you don't. These are content gaps.
• Suggested — extracted from your site content and matched to real search queries.

Select the ones worth tracking. A good filter: KD under 40, volume over 100, relevant to your business.

Watch positions weekly

Every week, unranked checks your position for each tracked keyword across the top 100 results. Your dashboard shows:

• Current position for every keyword
• Movement — did it go up, down, or stay flat?
• Striking distance flags — keywords between position 8 and 20 that are close to page one

This is where it gets actionable. The dashboard isn't just a wall of numbers — it's telling you where to spend your time.

What to do when you see the data

The whole point of tracking positions is to act on them. Here's the playbook:

Climbing keywords: don't touch them

If a keyword is steadily moving up, your content is working. Google is testing you in progressively higher positions. Resist the urge to rewrite the page — let it settle. The exception: if it stalls for 3+ weeks, consider a content refresh to nudge it further.

Striking distance keywords: push them over

Keywords at positions 8–20 are your highest-ROI opportunity. Google already trusts your page — you just need a nudge. The usual moves:

1. Refresh the content — fill gaps compared to what's ranking above you
2. Add 5–10 internal links from other relevant pages on your site
3. Tighten the title tag — make sure it includes the keyword and is compelling enough to click

These three things alone can move a keyword from position 14 to page one. We've seen it take as little as 2–3 weeks.

Dropping keywords: diagnose fast

A sudden drop usually means one of three things:

• A competitor published something better. Check the SERP — did a new result appear above you?
• A technical issue on your page. Run a quick SEO audit and look for broken elements, slow load times, or indexing problems.
• Google algorithm update. If multiple keywords dropped at the same time, it's probably algorithmic. Check SEO Twitter/X — someone will be talking about it.

Flat keywords: reconsider intent

A keyword stuck at position 40+ for weeks isn't going to magically jump. Usually this means your content doesn't match what Google wants for that query. Search the keyword, look at the top 5 results, and ask: is your page the same type of content? If Google shows tool pages and you wrote a blog post, that's your answer.

The compound effect

Position tracking isn't just about individual keywords. Over time, the data reveals patterns:

• Which content formats work for your site (guides vs. comparisons vs. tools)
• How long it takes your new content to start ranking
• Whether your domain authority is growing (new pages rank faster, existing pages climb)

This is the feedback loop that makes SEO work for indie makers. You write content, track what happens, and learn what moves the needle for your site specifically. Without tracking, you're publishing into the void and hoping.

The math on doing it manually

Say you track 30 keywords. Manually checking each one takes about 2 minutes (Google, scroll, find or not find, log the position). That's an hour per week, 4 hours per month — and you're still getting unreliable, non-historical data that varies by location.

An automated position checker does the same thing while you sleep, records perfect history, and costs a fraction of what your time is worth. This isn't a hard trade-off.

If you're still Googling yourself every Monday morning, set up proper tracking and spend that hour writing content instead. You'll rank faster and stay sane. And if you're comparing tools, we reviewed the best keyword searching tools with real pricing.