Position Tracking + My Reports: Monitoring Rankings and Reporting Results
Rankings only matter if you watch them systematically. This guide covers the full Position Tracking setup — campaign, keywords, location and device targeting — and then My Reports, where your tracking, audit, and analytics data becomes a scheduled report.
Position Tracking + My Reports: Monitoring Rankings and Reporting Results
A Position Tracking campaign watches your chosen keywords daily: where you rank, on which device, in which location, and which SERP features you hold. My Reports then assembles that tracking data — plus widgets from tools like Site Audit and Traffic Analytics — into a scheduled, shareable report. Setup first, reading second, reporting third.
HowToSemrush is an independent guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Semrush.
Key takeaways
Position Tracking is campaign-based and yours to configure. You choose the domain, the keywords, the location, and the device — the tool then watches daily.
Location targeting goes granular (down to city level). Track where your customers actually are, not a national average.
Read visibility trends, not single-day positions. Rankings wobble daily; the direction over weeks is the signal.
My Reports pulls widgets from multiple tools into one document — Position Tracking, Site Audit, Listing Management, Map Rank Tracker, Traffic Analytics — scheduled and shareable.
Report outcomes, not just positions. Pair rankings with what changed on the site so the report tells a story.
Most rank data in Semrush is historical and competitor-facing. Position Tracking is the opposite: forward-looking and yours. You define a campaign around your domain, hand it the keywords you care about, tell it where and on what device to check, and it records positions daily. My Reports turns that record — plus audit, traffic, and local data — into something you can hand to a client or a boss.
What Position Tracking is (and isn’t)
Position Tracking monitors a fixed keyword list for one domain, checking positions daily in the search engine, location, and device you specify. It reports your average position, an estimated-traffic figure, a visibility percentage, and which SERP features (featured snippets, local packs, image carousels, and the like) your pages hold or could target. Over time it draws the trend lines that turn “are we improving?” from a feeling into a chart.
What it is not: it is not a complete picture of your organic performance. It tracks only the keywords you give it. It is not Google Search Console, which shows the real queries real people typed; Position Tracking shows where you rank for the queries you chose to watch. The two complement each other: Search Console for discovery, Position Tracking for disciplined monitoring. If you connected Search Console during project setup — our first-project guide covers why that connection matters — you already have the discovery side.
Setting up your campaign, step by step
Setup happens inside a Semrush Project — the container holding your domain’s configured tools. If you have not created one yet, do that first via our first-project guide; the campaign setup assumes a project exists. (Semrush updates its interface — if a label moved, search Semrush’s help center for the current name.)
Create the campaign and name the domain. Open Position Tracking within your project and start a new campaign for the domain you want to monitor. Name campaigns clearly when you manage more than one site — “clientname.com — main” beats “Campaign 3” six months from now.
Choose the search engine and type. Google is the default most people need; Semrush supports other engines and search types (the exact list changes — check what is offered).
Set the location. This is the setting beginners underuse. Per Semrush’s docs, location targeting goes down to city level — and for local businesses, the city is where the truth lives. A business serving one metro area should track that metro area, not the whole country.
Set the device. Desktop and mobile rankings differ, and for most sites today mobile is where the audience is. Many users run both views so they can compare — a page ranking well on desktop but poorly on mobile is telling you something specific.
Add your keywords. Paste or import your list (more on choosing them below). You can add competitors’ domains too, so the campaign tracks their positions for the same keywords alongside yours.
Configure SERP-feature tracking and alerts. Tell the campaign which SERP features to watch, and set up notifications for significant movement. Then let it collect data for a few days before drawing conclusions.
Choosing keywords and locations like you mean it
A tracking campaign is only as good as its keyword list. The classic beginner mistake is tracking 500 keywords and reading none of them. Aim for a list you will genuinely review — often a few dozen to a couple of hundred for a small site.
Build the list in three layers:
Money pages first. The keywords tied to pages that earn revenue or leads — product pages, service pages, core terms. These get watched closest because movement here has a dollar value.
Content targets second. The informational keywords your guides target. These move slower and that is fine; the trend over a quarter is what matters.
A few defensive terms third. Your brand name and common misspellings. You should own these; if a competitor outranks you for your own brand, you want to know that week. Tag the list by site section, intent, or priority — a tagged list answers “how are the service pages doing?” in one click.
On locations: match the tracking location to the business reality. A nationwide store tracks nationally. A business serving three cities tracks those cities. A single-location local business tracks its city — complemented by the map-grid view from Map Rank Tracker, covered in our Listing Management guide.
Reading the dashboard: visibility, traffic, movement
After a week or two of data, the campaign dashboard starts telling its story. Learn to read four things:
Visibility % is the headline metric — roughly, how visible your domain is for the tracked keyword set, weighted by position and volume. When visibility climbs steadily over a month, the work is working. When it slides, something changed.
Estimated traffic translates positions into a rough visitor number — directional, not exact. Useful for comparing periods, dangerous as a precise claim in a client report. Label it as an estimate when you share it.
Average position is the simple mean of your tracked positions. It moves slowly and that is its virtue — it filters out daily noise. A three-position improvement across 100 keywords is a real result.
SERP features deserve their own glance. The campaign shows which features appear for your keywords and whether you hold them. A keyword where you rank #3 but own the featured snippet may outperform a #1 without one. Track feature ownership deliberately rather than as an afterthought.
The golden rule of reading: trends over snapshots. A keyword dropping from #4 to #7 on a Tuesday means almost nothing — rankings jitter daily. A keyword sliding from #4 to #12 over three weeks means something. Set your review cadence to match: weekly glances, monthly judgments.
The weekly tracking habit
Data you do not review is decoration. A workable habit:
Monday, 10 minutes: open the campaign, check the visibility trend and the biggest movers. Note anything dramatic — a page that fell off a cliff gets investigated this week.
Monthly, 45 minutes: review the full trend, check SERP-feature changes, and write three bullets: what improved, what declined, what you will do about the declines. Those bullets become the backbone of your report.
Quarterly, 2 hours: audit the keyword list itself. Remove keywords for deleted pages, add targets for new pages, re-tag anything that drifted. A stale list slowly lies to you.
When a drop appears, resist the urge to react the same day. Confirm it persists for a week, check whether competitors moved too, and only then diagnose. Our traffic-drop diagnosis workflow walks through the full checklist when the time comes.
And once a year, run the full sweep: our January SEO reset checklist strings Site Audit, Position Tracking, and Backlink Analytics into one start-of-year checkup.
My Reports: from data to a document
My Reports is Semrush’s report builder: widgets from across the toolkit — Position Tracking, Site Audit, Listing Management, Map Rank Tracker, Traffic Analytics — assembled into one scheduled, shareable document. Instead of screenshotting five tools into a slide deck, you build the report once and let it refresh.
The build process is widget-based: choose a data source, pick the visualization, arrange the sections, add text blocks for context and recommendations. The text blocks matter more than beginners expect — a chart without your interpretation is just a picture.
Configure the report to regenerate monthly and be delivered automatically. White-label options exist for agencies wanting client-facing documents without third-party branding; check current availability on Semrush’s pricing page, since packaging changes.
If you have been running audits alongside tracking, the Site Audit widgets give your report its technical half: Health Score trend, new vs. resolved issues. Our first Site Audit walkthrough covers the setup that feeds those widgets.
Building a report people actually read
A report nobody reads is a cost center. Structure yours so a busy client gets the message in 60 seconds:
Executive summary (your words, 3–5 bullets). What happened, why it matters, what happens next. Write this last, put it first.
Visibility and traffic trends (Position Tracking widgets). The headline charts, annotated with known causes — site changes, new content, Google updates.
Keyword movement table (top movers). Biggest gains and losses with the pages involved; losses get a one-line hypothesis each.
Technical health (Site Audit widgets). Health Score trend, issues fixed vs. new.
Competitor context (one widget). A competitor’s visibility line on the same chart keeps results honest — if everyone in the niche rose, say so.
Next month’s plan (your words). Three concrete actions. A report that ends with a plan gets renewed; one that ends with charts gets filed.
Keep it short enough to be read. Ten focused pages beat forty auto-generated ones — remove any widget you cannot explain in one sentence.
Mistakes that make tracking useless
Tracking keywords nobody searched for. If the list was built from imagination instead of research, the trends are fiction. Build the list from real keyword data first.
One national campaign for a local business. The location setting is the difference between useful and misleading. Set it where the customers are.
Never pruning the list. Dead pages, discontinued products, keywords you no longer target — a stale list reports on a site that no longer exists.
Charts without commentary. In My Reports, the auto-generated widgets are the raw material, not the product. Your interpretation is what the client pays for.
Frequently asked questions
How many keywords should I track?
Enough to cover your important pages, few enough that you will review them. For a small business site, a few dozen well-chosen keywords beat 500 unreviewed ones. Start with money pages, content targets, and brand terms; expand quarterly.
How long before Position Tracking data is useful?
A few days for initial readings; several weeks before trends mean anything. Treat the first month as baseline-building. From month two, the trend lines earn their keep.
Desktop or mobile — which device should I track?
Track the device your audience uses most, and consider tracking both for comparison. For most sites today that means mobile first, with desktop as the secondary view. A gap between the two often points to mobile experience issues worth investigating.
Can I track competitors in the same campaign?
Yes — add competitor domains so the campaign records their positions for your keyword list alongside yours. This is one of the most valuable views: it shows whether a ranking change is yours alone or shared across the niche. Our competitor analysis guide covers the broader intel workflow this complements.
Do scheduled My Reports cost extra?
Report scheduling and white-label options depend on your plan’s packaging, which Semrush changes over time. Check the current details on Semrush’s pricing page. Semrush updates its interface — if a label moved, search Semrush’s help center for the current name.
Your concrete next step
Create one Position Tracking campaign today for your most important domain: 20 keywords (10 money terms, 5 content targets, your brand plus 4 variants), your actual service location, both devices if your plan allows. Let it collect data for two weeks, then build a one-page My Reports document — one visibility chart, three bullets of your own commentary.
HowToSemrush is an independent educational guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Semrush. This article is for educational purposes only. Semrush updates its features and pricing over time — verify current details on semrush.com before making decisions.
