What is rank tracking?
Rank tracking is determining the positions of keywords that websites’ rank in SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Rank tracking tools help analyze and track the organic positions of keywords in real-time. It’s based on historical data and current rankings, so that you can analyze the marketing strategy and its effect on organic traffic.
Why is rank tracking needed?
Rank tracking is an essential part of the SEO workflow. It provides you with information about the position of your website on different search engines.
Search engine rankings are extremely crucial for many businesses online these days and their marketing budgets are targeted to take advantage of SEO tools to improve their serp features.
Additionally, keyword ranking remains one of the essential KPIs in SEO. However, you shouldn’t solely focus on the keyword positions. Rank tracking also influences the overall potential organic traffic of the website.
What are some of the best practices in rank tracking?
To make the most of keyword rank tracking, it’s essential to understand that ranking number 1 for every keyword shouldn’t be the only priority. The goal of rank tracking should be to track the progress of keyword positions and their effect on organic traffic.
Sometimes high-ranking positions for 10 keywords might bring less organic traffic than some other 10 keywords that website ranks in the middle of the first SERP.
Similarly, a small drop of the most important keyword may be more critical compared to important positions’ increase of 10 other keywords.
To understand this, you have to work with metrics that use these changes into account and offer clear information about potential organic traffic.
Read: SEO for dummies
Here are the 10 best rank tracking tools for SEO
Special Mention: Whatsmyserp
What’smySERP is a SERP and keyword tracking tool built for startups. One of the few tools on this list with a good free tier offering. A great choice if you’re a startup and just need to track a few key terms. Easy to understand analytics and a clean interface means you won’t struggle to get around either.
Apart from their SERP tracking capability, they have a convenient chrome extension and a handy SERP API.
1. SEO Profiler
SEO Profiler has a feature called DYNO Mapper, which is more than just keyword tracking. Although it may have limited features, this tool is easy to use and integrates Google analytics along with some other functions. SEO Profiler uses two main tools regarding usability.
SEO Profiler will keep a tab on your competitors and the keywords they use to rank well so that you can use them in your posts as well and then monitor how well you rank in its comparison. Moreover, this tool will also notify you of some unexplored keywords that don’t rank number 1 but have the potential to do so if used correctly. These demand-in-the-dust keywords will make your site rank high and bring quality organic traffic.
2. RankWatch
RankWatch is a cloud-based software that is developed as more than just a rank tracker. Unfortunately, this tool has some limited features in the free tools, but to utilize the tool altogether, you will have to purchase one of their packs. They have three types of plans ranging from $29 to $449/ month.
The free tools include a mobile-friendly test, Google algorithm updates and website analyzer. If you purchase the plan, you can access a keyword archive, email notifications, SEO management, local rank tracking, white label solutions, integration with Google Webmaster, keyword suggestions, a backlink analysis, and a comparison of your results with competitors. On the downside, the keyword research tool doesn’t have the power, and even the backlink checker doesn’t offer accurate results consistently.
3. Authority Labs
Authority Labs is an easy to use rank tracking tool. There are many features, but the most prominent one is the ability to track keywords daily for Yahoo, Google and Bing search page results, with an estimated search volume. With this tool, you can even track your keyword ranking locally with appropriate zip code and compare it with your competitors’ results. Authority labs help you export a CSV or PDF copies of your reposts.
This tool even enables you to compare your ranking with the previous day, three months ago, the previous month, previous week, or any date that you specify. Authority labs also know that keyword ranking doesn’t apply to visible text solely and provides results to video, snippets results from Google, Places, shopping, and images.
4. Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a paid SaaS tool that is used for outreach to bloggers and press. It isn’t technically an SEO tool, but for link building, there is a lot of outreach involved. This tool makes your outreach effort 10 times easier than the manual process.
Their additional sequence feature allows you to set up automatic follow-up emails. Once you enter a few keywords related to your content. Pitchbox will show some of the best sites that create similar content, and so you can connect with these prospects.
Pitchbox provides more than 100 potential connections for a single keyword. They also offer SEO features like link monitoring, and their plans allow multiple users. So, if you have a team, this feature would be quite helpful. The plans start from $195/month, but if more people contribute, this can be affordable.
Another alternative worth taking a look at is Respona – they have cheaper pricing and an easy to use interface.
5. Mangools
Mangools is a free tool that is used for rank tracking. This tool is known for providing the best value for money in their SEO packages. They have taken a new approach to design the look of SEO tools and made easy to use tools with exceptional designing.
They have not complicated the tool with tons of features that people would never use. Their most unique feature called KWFinder is their most popular tool that analyses the competitor and provides accurate keyword difficulty metrics.
Mangools tools enable you to see your competitors keywords, perform rank tracking, analyze SERPs, see your competitors backlinks, and get other SEO insights on your competitors. They even provide a browser extension that allows you to use their tools while browsing the Internet.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular rank tracking tools as it is easy to use. By using SEMrush’s search bar, you can find the ranking of a page or site on Bing and Google by providing the URL. Once, you have got the result. You can compare them with how other pages and sites rank by selecting a keyword. On the downside, this tool doesn’t differentiate between your competitors’ site and your site.
The key difference between SEMrush and other similar tools is that you need to wait for SEMrush to finish analyzing the page or website and manually choose each keyword. While the others do this work with less effort, and you can see the results for all the keywords in a single result page.
7. DYNO Mapper
DYNO Mapper is a keyword tracking tool as well as a visual sitemap generator. This tool first creates a sitemap of your website and then pulls any keywords automatically that are used in the meta of your site. You also have the option of individual keyword tracking by location or search engine. DYNO Mapper is integrated with content inventory and audits, Google Analytics, accessibility testing in one tool and information on your internal links.
You can even find your highest-ranking pages that are important for planning future content, editing existing content and redesigning your site. You can also monitor your competitor’s ranking helping you stay up-to-date with current trends and maybe gain the upper hand. You’ll also get regular notifications about your site’s performance, with weekly or monthly content monitoring, daily keyword ranking and sitemap comments.
8. WooRank
WooRank’s dashboard provides technical information on your website. It also enables you to add the URL of competitor sites’ so that you can compare and see how your websites rank in comparison to their website. The website review function will provide your site’s current ranking in terms of SEO as a whole. It will also give positive feedback and some suggestions to improve your current rank.
This feature has an option to continue offering you to review your site multiple times and comparing the previous results to determine your growth.
WooRanking also picks up keywords used in the past and gives suggestions for keywords that might be missing in your content. You can try WooRanking with a free 7-day trial, and if you end up liking the service, you can go for the Pro Plan that costs $49/month.
9. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular name in SEO ranking tools. It is best used along with another keyword ranking tool. It primarily focuses on backlinks, but it is also competent as a keyword ranking tool. With Ahrefs, you can see what external links your competitors are using and their top pages and IPs. This tool also provides great customer service, including support, so that you never get stuck with operating this tool.
You can specify the country’s search engine results that you want to analyze for your website. This helps you get a local report. This is an underrated feature. When doing keyword research, you can specify the search engine, such as Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu and more.
The problem is many site owners don’t understand that your site ranks better in your country as compared to worldwide. The free version has limited features, so you can go for the $79/month pack to use all features.
P.S.: We are also using Ahrefs and we highly recommend the tool!
10. Whitespark
Whitespark is a cloud-based rank tracking tool. This tool is packed with many useful tools. Whitespark automatically analyses your SEO performance. First, determine the seed keywords you want to rank. Second use the suggested keywords on your site.
Whitespark also provides positive feedback and suggestions to improve the ranking. This helps you understand where you need to put more work. This tool promises 100% accuracy for their keyword tracking.
They also run a quick second run at no additional cost if they suspect any errors in your reports. Whitespark packages start from $5 per month, so start-ups and bloggers can afford this service. The plans go up to $200 per month for a package that is used for Enterprise.
Search engine rankings
As I already mentioned, search engine rankings are extremely important for many businesses. Your keyword rankings require lots of resources, especially time and money. Rank tracker tools can save you the time by helping to keep track of your target keywords and keyword rankings.
The success of your business can be literally built on the search results and your advanced SEO strategy. Invest in your SEO strategy and build the successful future of your business in search results.
In the post, you’ve learned…
How rank tracking improves your SEO strategy.
Why is ranking tracking tool needed.
Best practices of rank tracking and 10 best rank tracking tools to drive quality organic traffic to your website.
Now, you are ready to use rank tracking tools to boost the ranking of your website by using high-ranking keywords. It is not a rocket science, but you need to understand your customer’s point of perspective and understand what they might be searching for specifically.
Use both short-tail and long-tail keywords and work towards creating the best user experience possible. Then the results will follow.
If you have additional questions about Ahrefs, reach out to us and we will tell you our personal experience with the rank tracking tool.