Rank Tracker Software

Website Rank Tracker Buying Guide

Implementing an SEO strategy is only half work done, as the remaining half involves tracking its performance across various search engines. This usually involves detecting and monitoring the rankings of Web pages according to keywords in use. This is exactly what a website rank tracker does for you! However, that is not the only ability or feature of such an SEO tool or suite.

Earlier, website analytics tools used to offer keywords and keyword ranking data. Since last few years, search engines started encrypting search queries (to protect their user's policy?) and that made it difficult for website owners to track keyword’s ranking through website analytics tools itself.

Webmaster Tools

If you already added and verified your website(s) through platforms like Google Webmaster tools or Bing Webmaster tools, they allow you to track your site’s keyword rankings for verified sites. Perhaps no paid tools mentioned here can provide as accurate data as these but only problem with Google or Bing WMT is that, you can track only your websites after they are verified. You can’t keep watch on your competitor’s sites or you won’t have border overview of scene. Additionally they’re limited to only one search engine and no detailed analysis of ranking is provided just like these professional tools. For some site owners though, these tools are sufficient enough.

How Website Rank Tracker Works?

Website rank trackers can even suggest not-included keywords for better ranking, keep an eye on competitors’ keywords, and analyze backlinks. In short, they can prove to be the most efficient way to track the progress of your site and make it more visible by improving your SEO efforts. These suites or tools are capable of doing the most legwork, right from building links to suggesting extra high-traffic keywords.

How to Select Right Tool?

Nevertheless, you will not require all features of a rank tracker. This is because your business requirements and budget tend to decide which ones are required, and which ones are not. This is vital to remember, because the more the features are, the higher is the cost! Obviously, nobody would like to pay more for the extra or non-essential features or utilities. Therefore, it is essential to choose the right rank tracker for your business.

However, the market is flooded with several site rank trackers. Nevertheless, you can choose the most suitable one by choosing the features that are worth having! Therefore, here are such features to look for in a rank tracker.

Web-based Operation

Rather than choosing a rank tracker that demands setup and activation on a dedicated server or on a desktop computer, it is more efficient to choose a Cloud-based or Web-based tracker. Such a tool or suite can help you track and analyze the rankings from anywhere and at anytime. Further, many tasks are automated to save your time and efforts.

Accurate Rankings

In most former rank trackers, discrepancy in rankings across different search engines is a prevalent issue. However, the modern web-based trackers seem to solve this issue by using location-dependent IP for fetching accurate rankings. Many of these position trackers depend on their own data source or rely on sophisticated search engine APIs to collect rankings so mostly accurate.

Search Engines Supported

Many website rank trackers tend to track rankings of your pages and keywords on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However, you will find a few trackers supporting only Google, some supporting only these three search engines, and a handful supporting several other search engines. You can choose to invest in the one that covers the search engines of your choice.

Local SEO

Local SEO is essential for all businesses, especially for the small- and medium-scale ones with have local customers and rely on their business only. In last few years, importance of local ranking has grown quickly. Therefore, choose a rank tracker that can track the rankings of your keywords according to the location or across cities or countries.

Competitive Analysis

The best rank tracker keeps an eye on your niche competition in great depth. It does so by comparing your keyword targets, inbound links, traffic, authority, and search engine rankings with those of your competitors’ sites. In this way, the best rank tracker helps modeling your campaign by getting inspired from other successful sites.

White Labeling

If you do not want to show your clients how you are tracking your SEO efforts for their sites, white label reporting is certainly an essential feature. It allows including your own description and company’s logo so that the client gets a nice impression of your monitoring activities. If you're a web design firm or digital marketing agency working for many clients, then this is must have option to look for.

Reporting

Without customizable reports, no SEO tool can be a comprehensive one. A reliable rank tracker tool or suite is the one that not only generates quick reports on keywords, links, and other metrics but also allows exporting the same in different formats such as PDF and Excel.

Instant Alerts

It is always good to have an instant notification of a change in the position of keywords and pages. Install Alerts allow you to can fix any issue on your website or elsewhere which may have caused drop in rankings and before it is too late. Therefore, consider a tracker that can send you instant email alerts.

Well, these are some of the must have features in your rank tracker tool.