Semrush Position Tracking, and the reports your plan will not show you

Every review of Semrush lists Position Tracking as a headline feature and stops there. It is a good rank tracker. The problem is that the four things which turn a rank tracker into something you send a client are not all on the plan you are probably buying.

I know because I recorded six hours on that plan and hit the wall four separate times.

Setting it up once, properly

Position Tracking lives inside a project, so it needs the domain connected first. Then four decisions, all of which are annoying to change later:

1. Search engine and country. Google, and the market you actually sell in.
2. Device. Desktop, mobile or tablet. One per campaign. Rankings genuinely differ, so pick the one your buyers use rather than the one that flatters you.
3. Keywords. The campaign screen shows your usage against the plan’s total allowance as you add them, which is the moment most people realise the allowance is shared across every project.
4. Competitors. Add them at setup. Everything comparative downstream depends on them being there.

Once it runs, it reports daily: visibility, estimated traffic, average position, and movement broken out by date range. That last part is what makes it worth having. It told me a specific site had declined between two named dates by a specific percentage, which is a different quality of information from “rankings are down”.

The keyword allowance is the real plan limit

500 keywords tracked daily on SEO, 1,500 on Pro+, 5,000 on Advanced, as published on 20 August 2026.

That sounds generous until you count properly. One site, two devices, three countries is three campaigns of the same keyword list, and the allowance is consumed per tracked keyword per campaign. An agency with eight clients on the middle tier is rationing.

The four things that were not on my plan

This is the part I would want to know before subscribing, and it is not on the pricing page in these words.

Share of voice. Absent from the overview report. It is the single metric that best answers “are we winning this market”, and it is the one clients understand without a tutorial.

Devices and location comparison. You can track one device per campaign. Comparing across them, in one view, was not available.

Keyword tagging. Grouping tracked keywords by tag and reporting on the groups. Without it a 1,500-keyword campaign is one undifferentiated list.

The cannibalisation report. It exists in the interface and surfaces where two of your pages compete for one query. Also above the tier I was on.

Four features, all of them the reporting layer rather than the tracking layer. The tracker worked fine. What I could not do was turn it into a deliverable. If that is your use case, price the tier that has share of voice rather than the tier that has enough keywords.

Pair it with Organic Traffic Insights

One workflow that genuinely earns its place. Google Analytics reports most organic keywords as “not provided”, and Organic Traffic Insights joins Search Console query data to Analytics sessions to recover which keywords actually drove which landing pages.

It is a three-minute setup and it answers a question Position Tracking cannot: not where you rank, but what people typed before they arrived. Run it once a month against your top landing pages.

What to actually do with it

Set one campaign per market you sell in, on the device your buyers use, with your three real competitors added at setup. Check it weekly, not daily, because daily movement on a small keyword set is noise and you will make bad decisions from it.

Then watch the date-range comparison rather than the position numbers. A page that dropped four places the week you changed the template is a finding. A page that moves between position eight and eleven forever is the SERP breathing.