Setting up rank tracking
Rank tracking monitors your keyword positions in Google organic results. Positions come from VisibilityIQ’s rank-tracking service and are supplemented with Google Search Console data for keywords not yet showing in GSC. The rank-tracking service is included in your plan — there’s no API key to obtain or paste. Setup is just three things: add the keywords you want to track, pick the market you care about, and choose how often VisibilityIQ refreshes the data.
What you’ll need
Section titled “What you’ll need”- The keywords you want to track.
- The target database (country/region) you want to track, e.g.
us,uk,de. - A monthly data budget — VisibilityIQ enforces a hard ceiling on how much data each sync may pull so a runaway sync can’t burn through your monthly allowance.
- Optionally, a connected GSC property to seed keywords from your real query data.
Choose database and region
Section titled “Choose database and region”The database determines which Google locale your positions are checked against. Each project tracks one primary database. Set it to the country you sell into — us for the United States, uk for the United Kingdom, and so on. Positions for competitor.com in the us database are not comparable to its positions in de; keep one project per market if you operate in several.
Add keywords
Section titled “Add keywords”- Go to Rank Tracking → Keywords and click Add keywords.
- Enter one keyword per line, or paste a list.
- Save. Each keyword is hashed to a SHA-256
keyword_hash(lowercase, trimmed) that joins it across the rankings, history, and competitor-landscape tables.
If GSC is connected, click Import from GSC to pull your top-performing queries automatically; imported keywords merge with anything you added manually.
Sync cadence
Section titled “Sync cadence”VisibilityIQ supports four cadences: daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly. The default is weekly, which balances freshness against data cost for most sites. Choose daily only for fast-moving commercial terms where a one-day-old position is stale. Only one sync runs per project at a time — a running status acts as a mutex, so a manual sync won’t collide with a scheduled one.
Monthly data budget
Section titled “Monthly data budget”Every sync consumes data from your plan’s allowance. Set monthly data budget to the maximum VisibilityIQ may spend per calendar month. Before each sync the service checks consumed-vs-budget; once the budget is reached, the sync aborts with quota_exceeded rather than overspending. Every run is recorded in organic_sync_log with its start time, budget consumed, keywords synced, and final status, so you can see exactly where your budget went.