We’ve Reviewed RankTracker — Better Than the Alternatives?

Let’s face it—every craftsman needs tools. SEO is no different—we all rely on them.

How do you pick the right one with so many of them available?

To make it easier for you to make the right choice, we’ve reviewed over 35 of the best rank trackers, based on:

• Price
• Accuracy
• Check frequency
• Search engine support
• Location support
• Device support
• And other advanced features.

Instead of making a bad call and only realizing it after you’ve moved your entire reporting infrastructure to the wrong tool, read this article, and you’ll be able to make an informed decision that will positively impact your organization. 

Who Are We to Judge the RankTracker?

There’s so much fluff out there, so you’d be right to question every source. But then, you did find us through organic search, right?

That’s because we know what we’re doing. But don’t take our word for it. Come and see how we took three projects in 2019 from virtually 0 to over 100,000 monthly organic search visitors!

DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)

CampusReel (B2C SaaS)

If you’re looking for B2C SEO, check out our CampusReel case study.

Doggypedia.org (Publisher)

See how we took Doggypedia to 18,500,000 Pinterest impressions and over 5,700 hours watched on YouTube in 2019.

When it comes to SEO, every piece of advice we share is based on data and real results. Opinions and intuition are valuable, but there’s nothing like actionable data gathered from real projects.

The best part? These results come from 24+ months of hard work, nearly 100,000 page 1 keywords, and many successful projects—so now you don’t have to. Now, let’s take a look at the RankTracker’s features and how well it integrates into your existing workflow.

About RankTracker

RankTracker is an all-in-one platform that has different tools in it, allowing you to do the following, all in one place:

1. Research keywords
2. Analyze the competition
3. Track your search engine ranking

While it has pretty much all the features you’ll need in your SEO efforts. It does a great job of making it easy to navigate through all of them.

Here’s a quick breakdown of RankTracker:

RankTracker Homepage

As soon as you get to the home page, you’ll be able to:

• Start a ten-day free trial.
• Learn more

RankTracker doesn’t have a free plan, but you will have those ten days during the trial to try it out and see if it fits your SEO needs. Note that this free trial will come with a limited number of options.

“Learn more” takes you to an easy-to-understand guide that explains the most important features using screenshots.

Once you create your free account, you will need to do the initial setup:

1. Connect the domain
2. Add keywords
3. Tracking settings (locations, search engines)
4. List competitors

Once you’re done with the setup, it takes you to the dashboard, which is actually quite easy to navigate and get insights from. A lot of tools struggle with this, so RankTracker’s dashboard definitely earns a top score on this one.

During the free trial, you’ll be able to track ten keywords and one competitor only—which is enough to do some testing, but you’ll definitely need to switch to a paid plan to run some real campaigns.

RankTracker has three paid plans available, and they are defined by the number of features they provide:

• RankTracker
• All in one
• Premium

Besides the features, the number of keywords you’re tracking will also affect the pricing. For example, any paid plan may track anywhere between 50 and 30,000 keywords. Obviously, you will have to pay for the keyword “credits.”

The plan you select will limit the number of features you’ll have available, while not affecting the number of keywords you’re tracking. Check the screenshot above for the full list of features that come with each plan.

We suggest you go with the “middle option”—All in one plan. It has all the features as the Premium option, except for the dedicated account manager.

SEO agencies with a high workload will easily get to the upper keyword count, and at that point, switching to a Premium plan will be a minor additional expense, as you can see on the screenshot below.

RankTracker Features

RankTracker is an all-in-one solution to keyword research, competition analysis, and tracking your research rankings. 

While the list of its features is extensive, its great user experience and easy-to-use layout make it possible for SEO professionals of “all sizes” to use it effectively.

The key features of RankTracker are:

• Search engine support
• Device support
• Location support
• PPC savings
• RankTracker
• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Actionable SEO tasks
• Web audit

Search Engine Support

You name it; they’ve got it. RankTracker’s search engine support is extensive—besides Google’s platforms, they cover Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, YouTube, and Baidu.

Regardless of the plan, you’ll have access to all these search engines. Especially important if you’re, say, targeting older people (a lot of them are on Bing), or the Russian market (Yandex is very popular there).

This alone easily makes them one of the best SERP trackers on our list.

Device Support

As you can see in the same screenshot above, you’ll always be able to pick desktop, mobile—or both—when setting up new tracking.

The fact that ever since 2017, the percentage of mobile users has been around 50%, makes it imperative for any SEO tool to have proper reporting when it comes to mobile vs. desktop visitors.

The Rank Tracker feature (more on that below), also allows you to instantly switch between desktop and mobile views, so you can focus on the data that matters to you and really fits your business goals.

Location Support

Where you’re ranking is sometimes as important as IF you’re ranking. When targeting a specific market or geographic location, just add these variables into the tracking setup, and you’ll be able to see how your site ranks in the area specified.

The SERP checker goes deep and shows you search results for a particular country, region, city, or even a neighborhood, so you can find the best keyword opportunities there.

PPC Savings

There’s always that ongoing battle between paid and organic marketing. This cool feature will definitely help you turn the tides for the organic side you’re fighting for. 

By tracking average CPC in the industry/location you’re competing in, RankTracker keeps track of how much you are saving… By ranking organically instead of pouring money into paid ads.

This is something that’s specific to RankTracker and will make your reporting way better. Plus, it will make it super easy to calculate ROI of your SEO efforts.

Rank Tracker

This is the platform’s main feature that makes it easy to track exactly how your SEO campaigns are performing. With helpful alerts and smooth visual overviews, the Rank Tracker tool oversees your site as it climbs up or down the search engine result ladder.

Rank Tracker makes it easy to focus on the data that really matters to you. It allows you to track your rankings for a specific location (country, region, city, even neighborhood), and even switch instantly between mobile and desktop views.

Keyword Research

RankTracker’s Keyword Finder feature allows you to look for new ranking opportunities. Think of it as a feature that was meant to replace some of the major tools that specialize in keyword research.

In reality, RankTracker really isn’t famous for it. The biggest names in that field are still tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

After trying out this RankTracker feature, we still decided to keep using Ahrefs as a tool that was intentionally developed for keyword research, and therefore, does a better job at it.

Competitor Analysis 

The number of competitors you will be able to keep track of is going to be defined by the plan you pick. Here’s the breakdown:

• RankTracker — three competitors/domain
• All in one — ten competitors/domain
• Premium — 20 competitors / domain

The process is really simple here—when you set up each domain you’ll be tracking, you can add a number of competitor domains to keep track of. The number of competitor domains depends on the plan you pick and can be three, ten, or 20 (check the list above).

Actionable SEO Tasks

This particularly beginner-friendly feature walks you through the process step by step. Some of the areas the task checklist covers:

• Setting up your website
• Researching keywords
• On-page SEO
• Content strategy
• Off-page SEO
• Social media

Obviously, you shouldn’t expect this feature to replace an actual human SEO expert, but it will definitely help those less experienced with staying on the right track and tackling SEO in a systematic, by-the-book way.

Web Audit

Along with Actionable SEO Tasks, Web Audit feature really helps with staying on the right track and maintaining a healthy system. 

This audit tool will constantly check all of your on-site SEO factors, alerting you of any issues, and actually telling you how to fix them as well. 

You can run these audits any time you like, and each time you’ll get all the data you need in minutes. All that information will be stored safely in your account, so you’ll be able to check it historically and compare it with new results.

Here’s how the Web Audit tool does this for your site:

1. Scans all your pages
2. Saves XML reports
3. Shows what’s urgent
4. Gives actionable insights
5. Compares previous scans
6. Evaluates over 100 data points

Here you can check all the SERP trackers we reviewed

How We Fixed Keyword Research Before Using RankTracker

No one questions how incredibly impactful keyword research is. It is so important, and it affects all of our SEO efforts. You cannot imagine a successful campaign without it, right?

And yet, it’s such a tedious, time-consuming process. But again, it has to be done right. 

If you do have the luxury of being in a bigger team, sure, you’ll usually gladly delegate this to some junior team members. But then, you will still need to teach them how to do it right and even then check their work just in case.

Now, if you’re working on your own, it’s going to be even worse—you’re just adding another task on your already full-grown list of responsibilities.

So, let’s first summarize the biggest issues surrounding keyword research (and then we’ll tell you exactly how we fixed them):

• You need an SEO expert to do it effectively
• It takes a lot of time to do it right, even for an expert
• Case studies show clearly what approach works, yet everyone’s still basing their decisions on intuition and “gut feeling”
• This makes it nearly impossible for senior SEOs to delegate research to junior team members or contractors 
• Results are inconsistent between different team members
• It limits your ability to scale your business

We know what you’re thinking—If only we had a machine, a tool, that could do this work for us. Or, at least that’s what we thought after having to do the keyword research for like 1000+ times. 

One day we’ve decided that it’s enough. And that is exactly how ClusterAi came to be.

Just imagine—you can clone yourself, and your clone, obviously, knows what you want. Even better – it knows what you need. You ask for unique content topics around main keywords and their variations, and in a minute’s time, you have them. Without even lifting a finger.

Here’s exactly what ClusterAi can do for you, regardless of your SEO experience:

1. ClusterAi relies on data from Google, allowing you to perform perfect keyword research every single time
2. It removes human error from the equation and automates weeks-worth of work
3. It enables everyone to do high-quality keyword research, regardless of previous SEO experience
4. ClusterAi creates unique content topics around main keywords and their variations, so you’ll know exactly what keyword variations you’ll use on each page, in minutes instead of weeks

How Does One Nail Keyword Research Every Single Time?

Let us give you an example to show you how easy it is to nail keyword research every single time with ClusterAi.

Say we were starting a project in the pet niche. 

1. We use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to search for “dog”
2. Then, we make sure to use the “Having same terms” feature

This shows us over 10 million different queries that contain the word “dog.” 

This search term is too broad. We want to focus on a more specific topic, say “dog food.”

Including “food” in the search terms narrows down the list to 455,000 variations.

What we can do now is export the top 25,000 keyword variations, based on search volume.

Then, all we need to do is import that list into ClusterAi. 

1. ClusterAi then scrapes the first ten results on Google for all keywords on the list
2. It compares each keyword against every other keyword
3. ClusterAi searches for keywords that have three or more URLs in common
4. Then it clusters the 25,000 keyword variations into unique content topics 

The data is presented as a list, sorted by:

• Main keyword
• Total search volume across all variations in a group
• The variations that can rank with the main keyword

You can click any cell to expand it and see the full list of variations.

That’s all there is to it! In minutes, we received a comprehensive list of over 1,000 unique content topics. 

That’s weeks-worth of keyword research that you can do in an instant. And since it’s all based on data pulled directly from Google, it’s perfect every time. 

The best part about ClusterAi is—anyone can do expert-level keyword research, even if they don’t know anything about SEO. 

How Did You Find This Article?

The first thing that comes to mind when talking about SEO is probably backlinks, along with other complicated technical BS.

Now, what if you could successfully rank, again and again, without those tactics?

That’s exactly what we’ve been able to achieve—almost 100,000 first page keywords across our projects. No backlinks. No complicated BS.

How?

With ClusterAi and our battle-tested processes.

DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)

If you want to learn how you can repeatedly get results like these, check out our free guides below:

1. SEO ROI Calculator
2. How Google Actually works
3. How we crush B2B SaaS SEO
4. How to get the fastest SEO results
5. How we dominate B2C SaaS SEO
6. How to consistently rank high without backlinks
7. Where to find and how to hire affordable, high-quality writers
8. How to turn your writers into expert SEO content writers
9. How to leverage Brand Jacking to “steal” your competitors’ traffic