You have a number of different search terms that you want your website to be found for. You usually set these in the keywording process. With ranking monitoring you get data on where your content is placed in the Google Top 100 search results (SERPs). In short, it is search engine optimization success control.
Rankings change over time. If your website is ranked number 1 for a specific keyword today, it doesn't have to be the case next week. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that competitors do more successful search engine optimization, or that Google has changed the rating of your domain or has carried out a core update or because you may have made a technical error. If you monitor your rankings you can see how your content is ranked every day.
First you have to know for which keywords your website should be found. The number of keywords can vary greatly depending on the size of the website. You put these search terms in the Keyword Monitoring Tool. With good tools, you will get new data every 24 hours and see the position of your website for a certain keyword on a daily basis. You can also see where your competitors are ranking and how good.
First, you can use it to check the success of your SEO measures. Do you write good texts and produce high quality content? As a result, your rankings should also improve. But you can also see where competitors are stronger than you or where potentials and quick wins are possible. After Google Core Updates, you can see the effects of the update on your website within a few hours. In addition, you can see which of your URLs rank and whether you have for example double rankings.
You can of course check your rankings manually and save yourself money. The Google Rank Checker can be used for this. However, if you want to monitor larger amounts of keywords, continuous monitoring saves time. Does your sales depend on organic search engine traffic or if you have strong competitors there is actually no way around it.
Google shows different search results for the same keyword. Pages that are not optimized for mobile devices are ranked lower if you search on a mobile phone than when searching on a desktop computer. If you search for the keyword "gas station" in Boston, you will get completely different results than if you search for the same keyword in Miami (which you would expect). Over 30% of all Google searches get localized results. Therefore you should use a rank monitoring which enables you to monitor desktop, mobile and local rankings.
Google is the global market leader for search engines. In Germany, 92% of all search queries are made via Google. Only in China and Russia are strong competitors with Baidu and Yandex. Bing has a global market share of just under 3%, followed by Yahoo with 1.5%. So unless you do SEO for Russia or China, it (unfortunately) makes little sense to monitor other search engines.