🔍 Overview
Rank Tracker reports your keyword positions for a specific country. If your project was set up with the United States and your audience is in Turkey, your rankings may not reflect what your customers actually see. This article explains how to move your tracking to Turkey without creating a duplicate project or losing your existing data.
🌐 Why the Tracking Country Matters
Search results differ from country to country. The same keyword can show different websites, in a different order, depending on where the search is made. Tracking the wrong country can lead to:
- Rankings that look better or worse than they really are for your audience
- Missing local competitors in your reports
- Confusing trends when you compare results with other tools or with your own searches
✅ Before You Start
A few minutes of preparation will help you avoid surprises:
- Do not delete the project. Your existing history stays attached to the project, so you do not need to start over.
- Note today's date. Rankings checked after the change will reflect Turkey, so you will want to know where the switch happened when you read your trend charts.
- Review your keywords. If you want to track Turkish-language searches, prepare the Turkish versions of your keywords as well.
- Check your permissions. You need to be the project owner or have edit access to change project settings.
🛠️ Steps to Change the Country to Turkey
Menu names can vary slightly depending on your plan and the current version of the platform, but the process is generally as follows:
- Log in to Search Atlas and open the project you want to update.
- Go to Rank Tracker from the project menu.
- Open the Rank Tracker settings or the location option for the project or keyword list.
- Find the Country or Location field, which currently shows United States.
- Select Turkey from the list. If you want city-level tracking, choose the city, such as Istanbul or Ankara, if it is available.
- If a language option is shown, choose the one that matches your audience, such as Turkish.
- Save your changes.
- Wait for the next rank update, then check that the keywords show Turkey as the tracked location.
➕ If the Country Cannot Be Edited
In some setups, the location is locked to the keywords that were already added. If you cannot edit the country on existing keywords, you can still keep everything in the same project:
- Open Rank Tracker in your existing project.
- Choose the option to add keywords.
- Select Turkey as the location for the new keywords.
- Add the keywords you want to track, in English, Turkish, or both.
- Save and wait for the first ranking check to complete.
This approach keeps your project, your historical US data, and your settings in one place, and it avoids creating a duplicate project.
📊 What Happens to Your Existing Data
- Historical data is kept. Positions already collected for the United States remain in the project history.
- New checks use the new country. After the change, new ranking updates reflect Turkey.
- Trend lines may shift. A sudden jump or drop right after the change is normal. It usually reflects the different search results in each country, not a real ranking change.
- Reports may mix periods. If you export or share a report that covers both periods, mention the switch date so readers understand the difference.
💡 Tips for Better Results in Turkey
- Track Turkish keywords. Customers in Turkey often search in Turkish, so English-only keywords may miss most of your real traffic.
- Use city-level tracking when it matters. For local businesses, results in Istanbul can differ from results elsewhere in the country.
- Compare against local competitors. Update your competitor list to include sites that rank in Turkey.
- Give it a full cycle. Wait for at least one complete update before judging the new data.
🧯 Troubleshooting
- I cannot find the country option. Check that you are inside the correct project and in the Rank Tracker section, and confirm that you have edit access.
- Turkey is not in the list. Refresh the page and try again. If it still does not appear, contact our team using the chat widget.
- The rankings still look like US results. Rank data refreshes on a schedule, so the first Turkey results may take a short time to appear.
- Positions differ from my own searches. Personalization, device type, and exact location can cause small differences. Try searching in a private browser window with the same location and language.
💬 Need More Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be instantly connected with a member of our team.