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How to organize your keywords using filters in the Rank Tracker
How to organize your keywords using filters in the Rank Tracker

See how you can analyze and organize your keywords with our advanced filters on Rank Tracker, with several practical examples.

Updated over 5 months ago

SEO specialists often need the flexibility of a spreadsheet when managing the data. The CSV exports are always an option, but SEOmonitor strives to offer that kind of flexibility within the platform, through the filtering capabilities for keywords and landing pages.

Our Rank Tracker gives you the option to filter any keyword list you’re on, in the Rank Tracker, based on any/all keyword attributes and performance metrics. Our filters:

  • provide a quick and handy way to isolate all your keywords and landing pages that fulfill one or more criteria

  • make your keyword organization easy and manageable

You can find the option to apply filters on both Keywords and Landing Pages tabs.

There are countless ways in which you can organize your keywords into meaningful clusters with labels, groups and/or smart groups in SEOmonitor’s Rank Tracker, by using one or a combination of filters. The filters can be combined through the logical operators AND and OR, to obtain a list of keywords that fulfill more than one criterion.

For example, the above combination filters all the keywords that once ranked in the top 5 (all-time best rank) but have changed ranks to below position 10 in the past 30 days. This gives you the list of keywords you ranked well for in the past, but no longer do.

You can save these sets of keywords into groups or smart groups so that you can locate them again easily. Furthermore, any keywords you add to the campaign that match the criteria of a smart group will be automatically added to the respective smart group. You can also use our pre-defined smart groups (which are created at the time of campaign setup) to kickstart your keyword organization.

Note: For new keywords, if you have already filtered and organized your keywords into groups or clusters (based on keyword or landing page attributes for instance), you can use CSV imports to bring the keywords along with the groups they're in. This saves you from filtering and grouping them again on SEOmonitor. Learn more about how you can import organized keywords via CSV in this article.

You can filter the keywords based on ranking data, keyword attributes, traffic data, and more. To make this convenient, we have categorized the filter based on the type of data that forms the criteria.

Note:

Use the quick-filters directly from the panel to quickly view the keywords:

  • whose landing pages underwent content updates that affected the ranks, and

  • whose landing pages are flagged for issues such as cannibalization, device rank discrepancy, etc.

Here is the list of filters by category, with examples of how you can use them:

Ranking data

Most of these filters are dependent on the timeframe you set in the Rank Tracker. All the filters can be used for either of the devices (mobile or desktop) by using the toggle switch next to the name of the filter. In this category, you can filter keywords by their:

  • Last desktop/mobile rank (in the given timeframe)

  • All-time best rank (ever, independent of the timeframe)

  • First rank (when the timeframe began)

  • Rank change (between the first and the last day of the timeframe): If the keyword has improved ranks, for instance, 15 to 7, the rank change is indicated as '+8'. If the keyword has lost positions, it is indicated with a negative. To see all the positive rank changes use the ^ in the filter, and for negative rank changes, use.

How you can use them

  • Organize keywords contributing to the overall organic results by selecting those with “Last Rank” above 11.

  • Keep an eye on keywords that have dropped and were previously part of the top 3, but have now gotten further down the page, by filtering based on “All-time best Rank” and “Last Rank”.

  • Watch out for keywords with volatile ranks, by creating a filter with “Rank Change” bigger than 10 indicated by ^10. This shows all the keywords that have climbed over 10 ranks in the specified timeframe so that you can focus on keeping them ranking high.

  • Organize your keyword portfolio based on a themed section of the campaign’s website, by filtering for those keywords that contain a specific term, like “shoes”. For this, you would use “Ranking Landing Pages”.

Keyword grouping

In this category, you can filter your keywords by:

  • Custom labels you specify for each keyword (which can also be used as another level of hierarchy within groups)

Keyword attributes

This category focuses on keyword attributes such as search volume and trend. You can filter the keywords by:

  • Keyword Name that contains/does not contain or exactly matches a certain phrase

  • Date Added (when the keyword was added to the SEOmonitor campaign)

  • Search Volume (latest available 12-month average, independent of the timeframe)

  • Year-over-Year Search Trend (latest available)

  • one or more Warnings (such as Misspellings, Low relevance, Localized, in Season, out of Season, etc.)

  • the presence of one or more SERP features on the last day of the timeframe (on mobile or desktop).

  • Top 10 Difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard, or already in Top 10)

  • SEO Opportunity Score

  • Main keywords and/or close variants, or aggregates

  • Search Intent (Informational, Commercial, Transactional, Navigational)

How you can use them

  • Easily curate keywords for an entire line of products with their name. For example, if you apply a “Keyword name” filter containing “dress” you’d track “party dress”, “black dress”, “cocktail dress” etc., without having to manually go through the list and add them to a group.

  • Alternatively, you could accomplish the same result by filtering based on the Landing Page the keyword is ranking for. For example, a “2023 Product Models” Keyword Group that filters keywords that have the “Ranking Landing Pages” attribute set to contain “/2023” would show both a BMW X3 and BMW X5, granted that their ranking landing pages contain “/2023”.

  • Visualize your team’s progress in keyword research, by creating chronological groups that reflect when these keywords were added, using the "Date added" filter.

  • Search volumes are a good indicator of market demand. By using the “Search Volume” filter you could create groups of keywords that would make the most sense to focus on.

  • Use the "SERP Features" filter to see which keywords trigger them and how they are affecting your CTR. For example, you can create a filtered group for keywords that trigger travel-related SERP features like “Flights” and “Bookings”.

  • Create different levels of backlogs for your keywords based on their Difficulty and corresponding Opportunity. For example, a smart group that has a “Top 10 difficulty” of “Easy” and an “SEO opportunity” higher than 8, would provide a curated list of ideas and opportunities for near-term improvements.

  • Quickly identify close variant keywords that you might not need tracked, or only look for main keywords in an aggregate, to easily focus on these.

  • Identify intent gaps, or prioritize content creation based on intent.

How you can use the "Warnings" filters

  • Brands of others - Weed out the keywords that are not good opportunities worth pursuing, by eliminating navigational keywords that represent other brand names, where most of the clicks would go to that brand's website.

  • Misspelled - Eliminate the errors that could arise by trying to optimize keywords that trigger SERPs for the original keyword, usually signaled with a “Did you mean” at the top of the page. You would not want to keep tracking them: their search volumes are misleading (as they usually represent the search volume from the main close variant keyword) and you would probably not optimize the page for them.

  • Low relevance - During the keyword research process, there’s a chance that some terms might slip through the manual curation process and you’d end up tracking keywords that have little chance of being improved. The “Low relevance” label is applied to keywords where the user's intention would not be met by the website’s content. Your website isn’t ranking, the main competitors you’ve selected aren’t ranking either, so it seems like a targeting mismatch. (Of course, this is just a heads-up, and you can keep tracking these keywords if you know they will have relevant pages and content in the future.)

  • Localized - Quickly highlight the keywords with highly-customized SERPs depending on the location, like “restaurants near me”. The presented SERP and its corresponding ranks would not be representative of the other locations, so this helps you be wary of how the search volumes would also be split between the different locations.

  • Seasonal - Filter the notable highly-seasonal keywords, that are in/out/approaching their peak season, to better organize your short- and medium-term optimization goals based on the changing seasonal demand.

Landing page attributes

This category focuses on the attributes of the landing pages that rank for the keywords. Here, you can filter the keywords by:

How you can use them

  • Categorize the keywords based on your product category by filtering the keywords that have the category phrase in their URL. For example, filter only those keywords whose "Ranking Landing Pages" "contains" the phrase "/men/shoes" for the Men's shoes product category.

  • Correlate the content changes on your website to your rank changes to see what change in content led to a rise or fall in the rank of a keyword, by filtering by "Content updates". See which keywords the content changes impacted and how, so that you can either iterate on or improve your content.

  • Cannibalization - keep an eye on keywords for which the ranking landing page changes constantly (more than 2 landing page switches in the SERP over the last 30 days), as it might suggest technical SEO improvements.

  • Device Rank Discrepancy - Creating groups of keywords that have radically different results from desktop to mobile will uncover possible issues with the mobile version of your campaign’s tracked domain.

  • No relevant landing page - spot keywords mistakenly added to the campaign or ones that won’t be targeted in the near future; for example, a retailer who is considering adding a new product category. You would be able to keep track of those keywords and competitors and provide monthly insights about the category as time goes by.

Traffic data

These are timeframe-relative filters, that add up or average different traffic-related metrics. Here, you can filter the keywords by:

  • the total number of Sessions for the timeframe

  • the average of Conversion Rates in the timeframe

  • the total number of Conversions for the timeframe

  • the total Revenue for the timeframe

  • the average of Bounce Rates in the timeframe

How you can use them

By combining “Sessions”, “Conversion Rate”, “Conversions” and/or “Revenue” metrics, you can create complex groups of keywords that, even though are generating a steady amount of traffic, might lack purchase intent. For example, a keyword group that generates over 1000 sessions per month, but at a conversion rate lower than 50% of the average, could signal a lack of stock.

Filtering across categories

With SEOmonitor, you can even combine criteria across categories to filter the keywords and put them into one smart group. For example, you might want to know which keywords trigger a Google Ad but are in the top 3 already. For this, you would use the filters on “SERP feature” (Ad, "is listed") AND “Latest Rank” (higher than 4).



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