When you have a website or a blog you want to be sure that you are not falling behind any bigger rivals. It’s good to be a little competitive. To assure that you have a good rank, you should look into rank tracking and paying attention to competition.
#Rank #tracking means checking the positions of #keywords that a #website ranks for in search engine result pages.
The keywords that are checked are those that are used on your website, terms that you don’t necessarily optimize for, and keywords that your competitors rank for.
When you track targeted SEO keyword searches of your website you get an insight into what users are searching for in your line of work and where you show up in those searches. Keyword rankings are your pages’ positions within search results for a particular keyword search.
One of the most popular solutions for tracking your rank and performance against your competition is Rank Tracker by Ahrefs.
With Rank Tracker, you can monitor your Google ranking on both desktop and mobile, you just have to input or import a list of keywords, add multiple countries per keyword, and your competitors’ URLs. Once you set it all up, Ahrefs tracks the data and sends you updates regularly.
Rank Tracker helps you get a sense of your SEO efforts and progress, and with the graph it provides, you can get a history of your visibility, average position and traffic rate, and position distribution. You can set the range of the graph to any time period you want so you can really see what the data looks like over time.
The tool also finds keywords that a website ranks for and estimates how much traffic those keywords bring in.
Don’t worry about getting lost in all of your keywords. With this tool, you can easily sort your list with tags and filters. That way, you can find keywords that contain a specific word or phrase.
With Keyword Explorer, you can find and analyze keywords on different search engines such as Youtube, Amazon, and Bing, not just Google.
Rank Tracker also shows your data compared to ten competitors and reports on three aspects: ranking progress, search traffic, and SERP features. In the SERP features report, you can see the total percentage of SERP features you own and also the dynamics of your progress. In the same report, you can take a look at the breakdown of the features you own as well as the features that exist for your tracked keywords that you don’t own.
On the competitors dashboard, the graphs are also clickable, and here you can see how your competitors rank on the same interactive graphs, which gives you a lot of insight for something like a gap analysis and is fun to monitor.
In case you want to stay up to date with your progress, Rank Tracker sends you regular reports via email. Reports are sent either weekly or monthly, depending on your notifications settings.
Rank Tracker is such a helpful tool for growing your search traffic, researching your competitors, and getting more traffic to your website. But while it is one of the most popular tools, it’s not the only one, and here are some alternatives.
1. SerpWatch
SerpWatch is an advanced SEO tracking tool for detailed data on clients and competitors. With SerpWatch, you can compare search rankings as well as find the top 10 results for every keyword tracked and stored. With that information, you can figure out what’s working to boost your rankings and get you ahead of your competition.
You get a complete overview of all your projects and you can transform the performance data into reports that track progress. You can also get customizable notifications based on your criteria.
Have fast access to your most important keywords by “starring” them as your favorites. Doing that will place them above all your other projects, at the top of your dashboard to give you a clean and easily accessible insight into your current ranking.
The dashboard also provides you with advanced keyword data that gives you insight into how many times a keyword was searched for as well as its average CPC, competition status, and monthly revenue.
With this tool, you can monitor every major search engine and track every keyword on every website you manage. So basically, with the help of SerpWatch, you stay on top of your SEO and bring even more traffic to your website.
2. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a tool that allows you to generate keywords and content ideas, analyze traffic, top pages, and backlinks. You can get insight into what works best for your competitors so you can implement the same strategies into your business.
With the SEO pages report, you can find out which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular keyword phrases. And if you need keyword ideas, you can get suggestions from the free keyword tool and also have a generated list of keywords based on what is working for your competitors and what is searched for on Google.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is a tool designed to improve visibility across all of your channels. With its Keyword Overview feature, you can do an analysis of your keywords and get info on trends both organic and paid.
Through key metrics such as volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and more you can evaluate how a certain keyword affects your traffic. And through the Keyword Overview feature, you can see updates on search trends and the number of related keywords as well as other useful information.
You can increase your visibility with a list of alternative queries based on the keyword you have entered. You can also do keyword comparisons with up to five competitors and analyze common keywords shared by each site.
The tracking tools help you with tracking your progress and optimizing your efforts based on accurate data which is updated daily.
4. Mangools
Mangools offers keyword research, backlink research, rank monitoring, and competitor website traffic analysis tools. With Mangools you can find keywords that you can easily rank for and also see the ranking of your competitors.
You can scan a list of keywords, get a SERP breakdown for each of them, and sort the list using different metrics. The interface is simple, straightforward, and easy to use.
You can use the tool to research historical data so you can create content based on current and long-term trends.
To utilize the rank tracker tool, you simply give it a list of keywords and it tracks your search engine rankings for those terms. You can also tag certain keywords and thus mark them as important.
Final thoughts
With all that being said, it is obviously a good idea to look into implementing a rank tracker into your business. It benefits your website’s traffic and visibility by enabling you to see rankings, keywords, and how the competition is doing.
While Rank Tracker by Ahrefs is the most popular tool of this sort, I encourage you to try out SerpWatch which is a very good alternative.
It doesn’t have to be hard to optimize your pages and it’s important to have an insight into your SEO strategy data. So make sure your website is the best it can be with these tools.
