Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker

Keyword research and rank tracking tool providing unlimited keyword data.

$124

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Review

Rank Tracker is a mature player on the SEO market. It is a reputable tool that has been around for more than 10 years. It has an extensive functionality, but this comes at a price: the software has a rather steep learning curve for the newbies in the information technology. If you want to get most from the tool be prepared to invest 3-4 hours in order to set the working environment up.

There are several important points that differentiate the tool from the competitors. First, Rank Tracker must be installed on your computer. Yes, you need to download the installation package run it, install and configure the software. Enter the credentials for your Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. Optionally, you can schedule some tasks, customize views and reporting templates. Have I mentioned setting up proxies and anti-captcha?

It's not that bad though, desktop software comes with its benefits too. To begin with, there is no limit on the number of projects and the number of keywords per project. If you run a huge e-commerce website with over 10.000 keywords - it's a perfect solution. Extra projects and extra keywords do not come at an extra price. Additionally, you own your data. It is stored on your PC and is available to you 24/7 (Don't forget to make backup copies though).

A feature that I personally like about Rank Tracker and other products from SEO PowerSuite tool pack is the customization of views. You can add and remove columns with different SEO metrics, apply filters to the columns and combine filters. As the result, you can create nice meaningful data segments.

Who is it for?

Rank Tracker is absolutely an overkill for small website owners and those that need to optimize occasionally a couple of pages. There are too many features that will hardly be used. A simple cloud based tool or even Google Search console will likely cover all your needs.

Rank Tracker does not come with sufficient team collaboration functionality. As a result, it may not fit well for the projects where many SEO professionals are involved.

If you are running a small marketing agency, doing in-house SEO for your company, or you are a freelancer with a pool of SEO customers: Rank Tracker is probably a perfect solution for you.

Features

Rank Tracker as the name suggests is a tool that lets you track keyword rankings of your websites in different search engines. Besides, the tool comes with a keyword research module and a sort of keyword matrix. The latter lets you assign keywords to the respective pages of your website. Let's get through main features of Rank Tracker.

  • Keyword research
  • Track rankings
  • Competition research
  • Domain analysis
  • Generating reports

Keyword research

At the time of the writing Rank Tracker comes with 9 keyword research tools (sincerely, there are just 6, the others are just a marketing trick):
  • Ranking keywords - finds keywords that your website is already ranking for. Most likely, Rank Tracker is relying on some external database with domains mapped to the keywords they are ranking for, since the results are returned rather fast. Naturally this tool can be used to analyze the keywords your competitors are actually ranking for. Naturally, as all tools of this kind, you should not expect it to provide full fresh data set.
  • Keyword gap - this tool lets one compare the keywords your target website ranks for against the competitors. This tool is just an extension over Ranking keywords, where one can compare websites side beside.
  • Search Console and Google Analytics - I can hardly name this a research tool. The software lets you import data from Google's SEO tools. You have access to this data without additional tools, don't you?
  • Keyword Planner - the tools parses results from Google Ads Keyword planner. While it's nice to do your research in one tool without shifting back and forth between the applications, in this case it's easier to just do your research in Google tools and import the results into Rank Tracker. Are you wondering why? Rank Tracker often fails to fetch the data, from time to time one needs to pass additional verification of the Google account. Additionally, Google Keyword Planner allows one to preprocess keyword lists and filter queries before fetching a lot of useless data.
  • Autocomplete Tools - the tool tries to get autocomplete suggestions from different search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Yandex, etc) for your seed keywords. This is one of my favorite keyword research tools. It lets me shift from the beaten route and find keywords that are actually used by the users.
  • Related Searches - this is something similar to the previous tool. It parses suggestions that one gets in SERPs for a given keyword.
  • Related Questions - doubtfully useful parser of questions related to a target query. May be useful to the fans of "semantic web" and non-keyword based optimization theories.
  • TF-IDF Explorer - a fake tool that can do more harm than good.
  • Keyword Combinations - a simple but handy tool that can help you create cross product or permutations over a list of keywords. It can be rather useful for those of you that are optimizing e-commerce websites and run a long lists of keywords with specific patterns, like '$brand$ led TV'.

Track Rankings

Nothing outstanding here. The module updates the rankings and lets one create different views, where the rankings are compared against different SEO metrics. The only thing that make Rank Tracker stand out is the flexibility of the views. There are dozens of factors that can be sorted, filtered, included and excluded from the views. Just imagine having Excel or database front-end at your fingertips, that is how it feels.

Competition research

The tool shows how well your website performs as compared to the competitors. Like the number of unique keywords you and them are ranking for. While the reports might work well to persuade the customers that you are doing a great job, the practical benefit of this data is hardly noticeable.

Domain analysis

This is a high-level dashboard that gives you an overview over the metrics that SEOs typically use to evaluate 'quality' of a website. Such as Alexa rank, the number of pages indexed by different search engines, social media popularity, and the number of incoming links. This is a good-to-have feature in any SEO tool.

Generating reports

The reporting module is something that helps you convert the raw data in more fancy PDFs or HTMLs that your bosses or customer would like to see at the end of the day. Rank Tracker comes with a number of predefined templates but you can add custom ones that fir your personal needs.