How to Check Your Website Position on Google and Optimize It

Effective website optimization can be done if you know what aspects of the website need to be optimized in terms of performance. For that, you need to know how to check your website position on Google in order to optimize it optimally.

There are several factors that affect the performance of the website itself. These things relate to SEO metrics that have an impact on the website's position in the SERP. By knowing these aspects, you can perform optimization effectively and improve website rankings over time.

Learn what ranking position is, search types, ranking factors, and how to check your website position on Google. Here is the discussion:

What is ‘Ranking Position’ on Google?

When users perform searches by entering keywords related to the topic they want to search for, Google will match those keywords with various indexed web pages. Websites that have relevance to the keywords searched by users will be displayed on the search results page, or SERP.

Google sorts the list of websites on the search results page based on the relevance and quality of each website. The order on the SERP is also known as the 'ranking position'. Websites that are in the first place or at the top of the SERP rankings have the highest quality and level of relevance.

As a website manager, you need to know how to check your website position on Google. There are several benefits you can get if you know how to check the position of a website on Google. You can find out which content gets high rankings and vice versa.

Then, you can evaluate low-ranking content to improve its performance. Not only that, you can create new content with the same topic or format as high-ranking content.

Types of Search Results on Google

Google's algorithm is getting more sophisticated in presenting search results. Not only in the form of a list of articles, Google can also present various types of display in search results, commonly referred to as "rich results."

Rich results are more interactive and visually attractive displays, such as featured snippets, carousels, news, FAQs, and much more. The appearance of this search result will vary depending on the keywords being searched for and the device used.

For example, when you search for the keyword 'cara mengatasi crawl error', Google will display search results in the form of recipes, questions people also ask, and video tutorials. While for the keyword 'fried rice shop', Google displays the maps and pictures of the shop.

Factors Affecting Website Search and Position

How does Google determine the ranking of a website on search results pages? There are several factors used by Google as an assessment of the level of relevance and quality of the website.

If you want to get a high ranking, you must be able to optimize these factors on your website. Before learning how to check your website position on Google, you should know the following ranking factors:

• Content: Google will show websites with quality content at the top of their search results. Quality content is content that is able to answer the user's search intent. 
• User experience: Websites that prioritize user experience will be prioritized by Google. If the website is made only to outsmart search engines, then the website will not last long in the SERP. 
• Website speed: Users will not stay on a slow website for long, so website speed will affect your website's ranking. 
• Mobile view: Currently, more users are accessing websites via smartphones. A website with a good mobile display will be a signal to Google that the website puts its users first. 
• Backlinks: Websites that appear at the top of the SERP are trusted websites with high authority. One way to increase domain authority is to get quality backlinks from relevant, popular websites. 
• Domain age: Based on the data, 60% of the websites that are in the top 10 SERP rankings have domains that are over three years old.

How to Check Your Website Position on Google

If you want to know how to check your website position on Google, you can use GSC, or Google Search Console. GSC is a tool provided by Google officially and, of course, is free. These tools help website managers monitor website performance organically.

There are various features in GSC that you can use to maximize website performance in Google search results. Starting from the amount of organic traffic, keyword data used by the website, and website ranking. Here's how to check the website's position on Google with the GSC tools:

Sign In to Google Search Console

Before studying the guide on how to check your website position on Google, make sure that you are connected to the GSC. If your website is not linked, then you will not be able to get data from it. Read the complete guide on how to add a website to GSC.

Get to Know Tabs on the Google Search Console Dashboard

After the website is connected to GSC, the first step to finding out how to check its position on Google is to recognize the features on the GSC dashboard. Some of the key features you need to know about are:

• Overview - A page that displays a summary of data reports in GSC. There are four main reports that are displayed, namely performance, index, experience, and enhancement. 
• Performance - This feature displays data related to organic traffic that was successfully obtained from Google search results. You can view traffic data such as the number of clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position. 
• URL Inspection - You can use this feature to ask Google to index web pages. You can also find out the index status and issues on specific pages. 
• Index - If you want to find out comprehensive information regarding the index status and indexing issues on the website, you can use the 'Index' feature. This feature consists of four main reports, namely pages, videos, sitemaps, and removals. 
• Experience - A feature that displays website performance related to the quality of user experience. There are three main reports that you can find on the 'Experience' feature, namely user experience, core web vitals, and mobile usability.

Analysis of Page and Keyword Performance

On the 'Performance' page, you will see the total number of clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position that the website got in a certain time span. You can also see a graph of the growth of the data over time.

You can focus on the average position metric to find out how to check the position of a website on Google. This metric shows the average position of all web pages in the SERP over a certain period of time.

At the bottom, you will find more detailed data regarding website traffic and ranking. You can see website ranking based on query or keyword, page, country, device, search appearance, and date.

Website Optimization Steps That Can Be Done

After knowing how to check your website position on Google, you may want to get a higher position than the one you already have. For that, you can follow these optimization steps to increase your website ranking:

Produce Relevant Content

Create content that can answer the audience's search intent. You can find out users' intent by recognizing the type of keyword you are using.

If your content matches what the audience needs, then the website page will get high engagement. This will give Google the signal that indicates your content deserves a high ranking.

On-page SEO Optimization

On-page SEO optimization is done to improve the search engine and user-friendliness of your website. By doing on-page optimization, search engines can find out what keywords you are targeting and display your page in search results properly.

Some aspects of on-page that can be optimized are:

1. Meta title and meta description
2. URL slug
3. Image size and alt tags
4. Heading
5. Internal links
6. External links to relevant and credible websites

You can use the Title and Meta Description Checker from cmlabs to find out whether the one that you created already has an ideal appearance on the SERP.

Increase Website Speed

Make sure your website has good performance and fast loading. Use the Page Speed Test from cmlabs to find out how fast your website is performing in detail. Some tips to speed up your website are:

1. Use high-performance hosting
2. Reduce image size
3. Compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
4. Use caching method
5. Use asynchronous load
6. Reduce the number of 301 redirects. 
7. Use AMP on mobile displays

Get More Backlinks

The way to get high quality backlinks is to create content that is worthy of being used as a referral source. You can get backlinks naturally from websites that cite your content. This method is preferred by Google because natural backlinks indicate that your website is trusted and of high quality.

Thus, the explanation of how to check the position of the website on Google along with the steps to improve the position of the website. Hopefully, this guide is useful and you can apply it to your website.

To increase rankings on websites more easily, cmlabs provides SEO Consulting Services that can help improve your website's performance in the SERP.