If you want to get ahead of the competition, you need to track your website’s rankings.
It helps you identify what keyword campaigns are working well, which keywords you should be focusing on and the progress of your SEO campaign. Tracking is an essential part of your growth campaign and you can’t leave it out.
In this guide, we take a look at three free tools that keep you up-to-date with your website’s organic rankings.
Why Track Website Rankings
Your keywords are the most important part of your ranking equation.
Tracking your rank is essential to monitor the progress of your organic and paid SEO campaigns. By following what keywords you are ranking for and where your website is positioned with keywords you want it to rank for, you can efficiently allocate more marketing resources to that keyword.
The Problem With Free Website Rankings Tracker Apps
If you’re in a niche of your own and monitoring only a handful of keywords, using a free rank tracker could be the right approach, but we doubt that you’re only going to stick to monitoring five keywords or less, for instance.
You will soon want to expand the number of keywords you’re tracking, be able to track changes on a more frequent basis, get ranking reports for an entire week for your organization (or your clients), and get a bunch of other features that are only available on paid tools.
Going down the free route is a good idea in the beginning, but you’ll find that paid rank trackers won’t break the bank.
Candidate 1. SeoLocalRank
SeoLocalRank has a free rank tracker that you can use to monitor your keyword positions.
The great thing about this tool is that it also comes with an SEO metrics analyzer to check out other things about your website, such as page speed insights. However, it does come with its limitations.
Once you create an account, you are taken to the dashboard where you can input your website’s domain. Click on “Add your first keyword” to start the tracking process.
Add your keyword along with the location.
It will now take you to its ranking screen, where you have to give it a few moments to process your keyword.
Now that your keyword is being tracked, it will give you a graph showing the keyword’s position over some time
It will also show you the list of websites that are competing for the top 10 positions.
Read More: Growth Hacks for Your Online Marketplace
The only issue that we have with SeoLocalRank is the number of keywords that you can track. After creating an account, you’ll only be able to monitor five different keywords, and this will surely prove to be limiting, especially for growth hackers who have multiple offerings and require tracking various keywords at a time.
Candidate 2. SEO PowerSuite Rank Tracker
You’ll then get an email from SEO PowerSuite. Click “Create your first project.” You’ll be taken to a page where you can download a trial of their software
Type in your email address and name again.
Click on “Download” and install the file on your computer. We’ve downloaded the one for Mac, but Windows has its version as well.
Once you install the application suite, you’ll be taken to a wizard where you can input your domain name.
The next page will allow you to bind your Google Search Console and Google Analytics account.
Stick in the keywords you want to track on the third window.
You can pick which search engines you want to use to track your keyword rankings. They even have custom tools for you to use to give you an edge in local SEO.
It will now take you to a dashboard where you can track all your ranking activity.
But there’s more.
You can even do keyword research and competitor analysis on the platform itself. We like the SEO Power Suite not because it’s free but because of the amount of work you can do with it. It offers an alternative to having to use different applications for different tasks, and it’s UI is pretty intuitive even for advanced users.
It does have a catch.
You can’t save your work on it since you’re not paying for it, but if you’re up for downloading it on a regular basis – or keeping the application on perpetually – it is workable.
Candidate 3. Traffic Travis
This tool is another application that you can download that offers several other features, such as the SEO PowerSuite application.
After you give them your email address, they’ll send you a link to download their app. Install the app, and you are good to go. Make sure you grab the registration code from the email they will send you.
This will take you to a wizard where you can input your keywords and your domain address. There are a couple of search engine locations that you can use and it doesn’t just limit itself to Google.
After you save the project, give it a few moments to run and it will give you the rankings of your keywords. We found that if you’re ranking far from 100 in the search results, it won’t give you your exact rank.
You can find their rank tracker in the SEO tab.
It also has a host of other features just like SEO PowerSuite.
Like the other members of this list, the application has a bunch of limitations for free users.
You can only have a maximum of two projects and track 30 keywords. It will also show you the top 10 sites ranking for your keyword as well as 100 keyword suggestions.
And, as per usual, you can’t save reports unless you pay for the professional version. This tool is powerful if you want to run a few keywords. They do not have a version for the Mac.
Takeaways
Tracking your rankings is crucial if you want to gauge the growth of your company.
At the same time, your rank tracker can also give you actionable information when it comes to Google updates that are hitting your keywords or competitors getting the upper hand in particular campaigns. This gives you the leeway to adjust your marketing efforts effectively and do something about it.
Here’s what.
We love free rank trackers, and they’re great when you’re first starting, but the issue will remain the same, it’s limited.
As you growth hack and expand your business, you’ll want to keep track of more and more keywords because it’s a measure of how you’re doing in other “markets.” Say for example you have a business that’s all about pets, you might want to rank for “pet food,” but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to rank for “pet toys” either.
Most of the free keyword monitoring tools on our list are limited to only a handful of keywords at a time for convenient tracking.
Then, there’s the issue of the powerful tools that might not be available to you when you need them.
The good news is that we have a lot of these tools to choose from.
We advise that you still go out and get yourself a paid ranking tool when your budget allows it. When you’re first starting, the free versions of website rankings tools can definitely give you an edge, but as you take your growth to the next level, so should your tools.
Read More: Free Keyword Research Tools
3 comments
Peter
This is very well-written! Thankyou.
Digital Marketing Agency
Hi Author!
I really like your blog and become a fan of your blog, I love the way you wrote this content. Thanks for sharing such great information with us.
Gildas MAROT
You can track 10 keywords with a free SEMrush account.
It’s the best keyword tracking tool in my opinion and you can pay to track more keywords when you need it.
So you don’t have to setup a new tool once you need more features.