Whether you’re a new site owner or just looking for the best way to improve your site’s rankings, we give you the best keyword trackers we’ve found in the industry. These tools will help you in your quest to jump to the top of search engine results and drive more traffic to your site.
SEO keyword trackers measure your search engine rankings for targeted keywords and analyze changes in those rankings over time.
We all know how popular search engines are in driving people to websites. Research shows that most users click on one of the first three links that pop up in search results and forget about the rest.
To stay competitive, it’s essential to know how your keywords are ranking in search engines. But the best keyword trackers do much more. They show you how your rankings compare to your competitors and analyze how visitors are making their way to your site via desktop and mobile devices.
All of the tools in our reviews include the following features:
Organic and PPC (pay-per-click) keyword rank tracking
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO marketing tool that gives you everything you need under one roof. This software offers one of the most complete solutions for tracking keyword rankings, including the best competitor comparison on the market.
By using SEMrush’s Position Tracking, you can get an in-depth view of how your site is performing compared to competitors’ sites by any keyword. You can create projects based on your entire site or individual articles and automatically pull in all of the performing keywords for that project. SEMrush will then help you find the top competitors for that project and assign a unique Visibility Trend so you can easily see if you are rising or dropping in the rankings overall.
For PPC users, SEMrush also tells you what keywords your competitors are bidding on and gives you a handy SERP overview.
You can explore each competitor and identify keywords that you’re not targeting but should be. SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty tool even tells you how difficult it would be for your website to rank for each keyword.
Pros
Cons
Easy to use tools with quick data-loading
Extremely in-depth keyword tracking
Data updated daily
Includes rankings for Google, Yahoo and Bing
Position Tracking tool provides historical data
Competitors Discovery feature
Shows your domain’s or project’s visibility trend, estimated traffic, as well as average position for every keyword that you’re tracking
Get email alerts of ranking changes for particular keywords
Robust PDF reporting
Keyword Difficulty tool places too much emphasis on total Google results, perhaps making some keywords less difficult than their rating provides
Fee to add more than one user
Pricing
SEMrush offers a 7-day money back guarantee on all plans. The following prices are monthly. You get discounts if you pay annually.
Looking for a simple but accurate keyword tracker? AuthorityLabs could be the ideal tool for your daily search engine rank tracking needs. Some of its best tools include local tracking by city or zip code, competitor tracking and mobile rankings.
AuthorityLabs also has a couple of features you won’t find elsewhere. First, its “Now Provided” report uncovers Google’s ‘not provided’ data to show you which keywords are driving traffic to any page on your site.
Another unique feature saves you time by allowing you to group multiple domains covering the same topic.
Pros
Cons
Free tools available
Clean, intuitive user interface
Data updated daily
Excellent local keyword tracking
Includes rankings for Google, Yahoo and Bing
Easy-to-sort ranking tables, including competitor domains, historic rankings and more
Unique “Now Provided” tool fills in critical missing keyword data
Unlimited users
White-label reporting
Can get pricey if you have a lot of keywords to track
Some complaints that the data loads slowly
Pricing
AuthorityLabs provides some basic free SEO tools, and it offers a 30-day free trial for its paid plans.
Best known for its massive backlink index, Ahrefs has really ramped up its other SEO features, including a new and improved Rank Tracker that launched over 18 months ago.
Not only can you track your and your competitors’ organic and PPC rankings, but you can also track SERP features, see the estimated traffic brought in by each keyword, see position increases/decreases and much more.
Ahrefs also does a fantastic job at identifying keywords you should be ranking for compared to your competitors and gives you a keyword difficulty tool to help you improve with those keywords.
Like SEMrush, Ahrefs has strong all-in-one SEO tools, including link analysis, keyword research, site auditing, competitor analytics and more. It’s newer to the comprehensive SEO tool game and is becoming a contender with SEMrush, but it’s not quite there yet.
Pros
Cons
Discover domains and individual pages you’re competing with
Content Gap Analysis uncovers keywords that you don’t yet rank for, but your competitors do
SERP snapshots and featured snippet reports
Can help you quickly drive organic traffic to your site
Includes Google rankings only (not Yahoo and Bing)
Must purchase higher plans to get daily updates
Pricing
Ahrefs offers a 7-day trial for $7 for its Lite and Standard plans. You can save 20% off the following prices if you pay annually.
Lite
Standard
Advanced
Agency
Price Per Month
$99
$179
$399
$999
Number of Users
1
1
3
5
Campaigns
5
10
25
100
Tracked Keywords
300
1,000
4,000
10,000
Other Best SEO Ranking Tool Reviews
Although these two popular tools didn’t make our top three list, each is certainly worth consideration.
Moz Pro’s specialty is keyword tracking, and it does a fantastic job. Its primary limitation, which could be a dealbreaker, is that it only gives you weekly updates, rather than daily. If that’s not an issue for you, Moz Pro deserves serious consideration.
Moz Pro’s Rank Tracker gives you a weekly comprehensive overview of your rankings vs your competitors on Google, Bing and Yahoo at national and local levels. This tool also identifies what you need to do to gain ground, including landing in top SERP positions like featured snippets.
Moz Pro is another bundled SEO tool, with site auditing, keyword research and backlink analysis features. But these elements aren’t as strong as what you’ll get with SEMrush and Ahrefs.
SE Ranking got its start as a keyword tracking platform, and that’s still one of its best tools. This easy-to-use software is extremely flexible and gives you an in-depth view of both your and your competitors’ rankings.
We also saw a lot of online buzz that SE Ranking gives you incredibly reliable results. In fact, SE Ranking will provide a cached copy if you want to verify your results.
A major downside to SE Ranking is that its PPC competitor database is incomplete and still in Beta version. This could be a dealbreaker for some. Still, SE Ranking is among the most affordable and accurate trackers on the market, making it an excellent tool for organic rankings.
In addition to keyword tracking, SE Ranking includes on-page SEO auditing, keyword research, backlink monitoring, competitor research, lead generation, strong reporting and white labeling and much more.
Pros
Cons
Extremely accurate rankings
Intuitive user interface and navigation
Includes Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube rankings
Can track SERP features, paid rankings in Google AdWords, search volume and a relative traffic forecast
Automatically discover and track your top-10 competitors
Track Google Maps results in SERP and rankings
Very flexible pricing options
PPC database is still in Beta version and is incomplete
Can only track 5 competitors in one project
Pricing
SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. The following pricing is month-to-month. It offers graduated discounts up to 20% if you subscribe for multiple months.
Optimum Plan
Includes 10 websites, monitoring for 5,000 backlinks and auditing for 25,000 pages.
Weekly
Every 3 Days
Daily
250 Keywords
$23.40
$31.20
$39
500 Keywords
$32.40
$43.20
$54
750 Keywords
$41.40
$55.20
$69
Plus Plan
Includes unlimited websites, monitoring for 50,000 backlinks and auditing for 2,000 pages.
Weekly
Every 3 Days
Daily
1,000 Keywords
$53.40
$71.20
$89
1,750 Keywords
$89.40
$119.20
$149
Enterprise Plan
Includes unlimited websites, monitoring for 75,000 backlinks and auditing for 250,000 pages.
Weekly
Every 3 Days
Daily
2,500 Keywords
$113
$151
$189
5,000 Keywords
$209
$279
$349
10,000 Keywords
$329
$439
$549
15,000 Keywords
$449
$599
$749
20,000 Keywords
$539
$719
$899
How Do I Increase My Google Rankings?
Check out this brief video by SEO guru Neil Patel for some fantastic tips to give your rankings a boost.
What Are The Best SEO Tools?
If you’re looking for more than keyword tracking in your SEO tool or need additional tools to cover all your bases, be sure to read our experts’ comprehensive reviews of the best SEO tools on the market. We include features, pros and cons, pricing and more for the most popular SEO tools on the market.
Do you think all-in-one SEO suites are a better value than bundling specialized SEO tools?
While attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s graduate school for journalism and public relations in the late 1990s, Sally began a long career researching and writing about business, technical and scientific topics.
Her decades of experience as well as a passion to stay on top of the latest online tools and resources combine to help small businesses (and freelancers like herself) flourish. Her work has appeared in many notable media outlets, including The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, People, Forbes, Huffington Post, and more.
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