RankWatch Review & Alternatives — Does This “All-In-One” SEO Tool Live Up to Its Promises

Doing effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) takes a lot of time and effort. If you’re relying on a bunch of free online tools, your data will be dispersed, and you’ll struggle to see the big picture and improve the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. 

Thankfully, there are dozens of premium online tools that can provide you with the data you need to assess the effectiveness of your SEO and tweak your campaigns to improve your rankings. 

We’ve reviewed over 35 of the best rank trackers on: 

• Speed
• Accuracy
• Check frequency
• Search engine support
• Location support
• And other features

This way, you’ll see exactly what each of the most popular rank trackers offers, so you can choose the one that best fits your needs. 

RankWatch stands out among them as a tool that offers a bit more than just keyword tracking. It provides additional data regarding your backlinks, competitors, and hidden opportunities, which can help you improve your website’s ranking.

Why You Should Listen to Us About RankWatch

We understand SEO, and we know how Google actually works, so we know exactly what to look for in a rank tracker. 

Last year, we did SEO for three different projects and managed to take them from virtually no organic traffic to over 100,000 visitors per month.

DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)

Doggypedia.org (Publisher)

We grew Doggypedia to 18,500,000 Pinterest impressions and over 5,700 hours watched on YouTube in one year.

CampusReel (B2C Saas)

Want to learn B2C SEO? Check out our CampusReel case study.

About RankWatch

RankWatch is more than just a rank tracker. It’s an SEO tool that provides you with all the necessary data you need to improve your website’s SEO performance and generate tons of organic traffic. At least that’s what RankWatch promises on its homepage. 

We understand why they opted for the “all-in-one SEO tool” marketing pitch, but we would be hesitant to recommend it to experienced SEO professionals who are looking for more advanced functionalities on top of keyword tracking.

If you’re looking for a way to check how your website ranks on Google quickly and accurately, then RankWatch might be a decent option. 

The tool does come with a 14-day free trial, so you can test out its features before making a commitment. 

To get started, enter your email address and click the “Try For Free” button.

RankWatch Homepage

RankWatch doesn’t ask for credit card information to start the free trial, so there’s no fear of being charged automatically after the 14-day period. It does require you to input your phone number, but you can add an auto-generated one if you aren’t too keen on receiving promotional text messages from the company. 

When you click the confirmation link in the email, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can set up the tool and start tracking.

RankWatch Setup

While RankWatch appears bare-bones before you set up a project, you won’t be overwhelmed, and it will only take a few minutes to get started. Simply add your domain and project name, select the search engine you wish to track the rankings for, and you’re all set.

There’s also an option to select the country if you want to see rankings for a specific market. The tool also enables sub-domain tracking by default, meaning that it checks every single page under the domain you entered. You can also select city-based tracking, as well as have RankWatch prioritize local over organic ranking.

Once you add the search engines and location you want to track rankings for, the tool will prompt you to add the keywords. 

The great thing about RankWatch is the fact that it allows you to add keywords in bulk, as well as to import them from Google Analytics and Google Webmasters or via CSV.

Adding Keywords in RankWatch

Another awesome thing about RankWatch is that it doesn’t limit you in any way during the free trial. Most other rank trackers allow you to track only a handful of words and mess around with the most basic features. With RankWatch, you’ll have access to all of the tool’s features and can track up to 250 keywords with the free plan.

RankWatch Pricing

When it comes to paid plans, RankWatch isn’t the most affordable rank tracker out there, but it isn’t the most expensive option either.

The cheapest monthly plan is $29, but it limits you to only 250 keywords. This might be a decent option for bloggers who want to check the rankings for a few dozen of their posts. Even then, you are likely to reach the limit pretty quickly, given the fact that desktop and mobile searches, as well as different search engines, count towards the 250 monthly keywords separately. 

The much more realistic option is 1,500 monthly keywords for $99. This plan also includes a white label license — letting you add your logo and customize the reports — as well as an hour-long training session on how to effectively use RankWatch.

RankWatch Pricing

Alternatively, you can choose the custom plan and select the number of keywords you believe you’ll need to track. Comparatively, you’ll get fewer keywords for your money that way, but the gap between L and XL plans is 6,000 keywords, pretty much forcing you to go for this option if the 1,500 keyword limit doesn’t meet your needs.

There’s also an option to pay monthly, every six months, or annually. You’ll save about $10 – $15 if you choose these payment options, depending on the plan.

Here’s a quick overview of RankWatch, before we take a look at the tool’s features:

RankWatch Features

As we mentioned, RankWatch provides a lot more data on top of keyword rankings. With this tool, you can also check your backlinks, get an overview of your website’s performance, find new keywords you can rank for, and get insight into who your competitors are for specific keywords and how they’re ranking. 

The main features of RankWatch include:

1. Ranking overview
2. Search engine and device support
3. Keyword overview
4. Location support
5. Link center
6. Site auditor
7. Competitors
8. Hidden opportunity
9. Reports
10. Keyword research

Ranking Overview

The ranking overview is the heart and soul of RankWatch. This feature shows you how you rank for the keywords you added to the project and provides you with a wealth of data related to your rankings. 

The data is visually presented through charts, graphs, and lists, so you can easily find the information you’re looking for. 

RankWatch gives you the option to sort the results by:

1. Value
2. Change
3. Snippet

Apart from the current ranking, you’ll also see initial rank, highest rank, and search volume for each keyword on your list.

RankWatch Ranking Overview

What’s interesting is that RankWatch also shows you the page score for the sub-domains associated with every keyword. This is an excellent feature since it gives you additional insight into why your pages might be ranking lower than you expect them to.

RankWatch PageScore

With this feature, RankWatch shows you exactly what you did right, what things you need to fix on the page, and which areas you can improve upon. These quick tweaks can help you improve your rankings further, helping you get on the first page of Google. 

One thing worth mentioning is that RankWatch doesn’t offer any options regarding check frequency. The checks are performed automatically every 24 hours, meaning you can’t immediately see the effect of any changes you make on your pages. 

Search Engine and Device Support

Any good rank tracker should support multiple search engines and allow you to check the rankings on both desktop and mobile. RankWatch has you covered on this front.

RankWatch Search Engine and Device Support

RankWatch supports the following search engines:

• Google
• Google Maps
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Baidu
• Yandex
• Seznam
• Naver

When creating a project, you can select which search engine you want to check the rankings for, and you can add as many as you like. 

Keep in mind that you’re selecting both the search engine and the device from the same drop-down menu. If you want to check your Google rankings for both mobile and desktop, you’ll need to add Google and Google Mobile separately.

You can always edit the project later on if you want to add or remove a search engine. 

Keyword Overview

This feature simply lets you see the data for a specific keyword — its position, search volume, changes, and URL. 

Although not ground-breaking by any means, RankWatch’s Keyword Overview lets you inspect each keyword individually, which may be useful if you’re tracking dozens of keywords and find it difficult to find the data for a specific keyword from the dashboard. 

Location Support

When it comes to location support, RankWatch lets you narrow down your search by country and even by city. 

Simply enable the “City Based Tracking” option when creating or editing a project, and select the country and city you want to see the rankings for.

RankWatch Location Support

Link Center

In RankWatch’s Link Center, you can see an in-depth view of your backlinks. The tool shows you a variety of factors that impact the strength of your link profile and even allows you to analyze your competitor’s backlinks.

RankWatch Link Center

When you upgrade to a paid plan, you’ll also see your top landing pages and the total number of links for each page. RankWatch also shows you who is linking to your website and what anchors they’re using.

Site Auditor

RankWatch’s Site Auditor is an excellent way to get an overview of your website’s SEO performance in minutes. The tool crawls your website and checks it against a variety of important SEO factors, like:

• On-page SEO — How well your website meets the best search engine optimization practices
• Site’s speed — How fast the pages on your website load
• Mobile responsiveness — Does your site have a mobile-responsive design
• Social — How many fans and followers your site has

RankWatch Site Auditor

To get started with the Site Auditor, select your site’s URL configuration, the number of pages to be crawled, and how often you want RankWatch to crawl it. 

Once you set the parameters, the tool will notify you via email when it finishes crawling your website and provide you with a detailed report. 

Competitors

When you’re trying to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, it’s always good to know how your website fares against your competitors. RankWatch’s “Competitors” feature automatically pulls the top five highest-ranked competitors, based on the keywords you added to the project.

RankWatch Organic Competitors

The tool simply shows you the number of keywords in the top ten for your website and your competitors (three out of five in the image above). RankWatch does give some additional information regarding average rank, desktop speed, and backlinks, but it doesn’t show you the competitors’ top-ranking pages. 

Hidden Opportunity

The “hidden opportunity” feature of RankWatch is an interesting take on keyword suggestions. 

What this feature does is list out 50 keywords that are seemingly related to the ones you added in the project, and shows you their position, cost per click (CPC), and monthly search volumes. It also lets you add them to your list of tracked keywords directly from this page.

RankWatch Hidden Opportunity 

In our honest opinion, there are far better ways to figure out what keywords you should rank for and track. 

Reports

RankWatch has a pretty basic reporting feature, allowing you to generate a report for your projects and download it as a PDF or Excel file.

RankWatch Report

There isn’t a ton of customization available with RankWatch’s reporting feature. You can only choose between two options when it comes to how the data will be displayed within the report:

• By website position
• By page number

Apart from that, you can select a custom date range for the report, and that’s pretty much it.

There is no option to schedule the reports, and you can’t email them to clients from the tool. Instead, you’d have to download the report and send it manually, which is an oversight on the company’s part, in our opinion. 

RankWatch also pitches its “100% white labeling feature,” which allows you to add your logo to the report and change the colors. 

Keyword Research

While RankWatch provides a keyword research feature, it isn’t exactly a strong professional process. The tool can list out keywords that are related to the phrase you enter and provides search volumes, cost per click, and information regarding the competition. 

That said, it takes a while to load and the tool doesn’t allow you to export the keywords. The fact of the matter is that free tools such as Google Keyword Planner are faster and provide a lot more information than RankWatch — a paid rank tracker — does.  

RankWatch Alternatives

Despite the fact that RankWatch has been around for a decade, some of the features seem unpolished, and several key functionalities — like check frequency and report scheduling — are missing. 

There’s also the fact that the tool can be a bit slow at times. If you’re looking for a faster or a more affordable rank tracker, check out RankWatch alternatives here. 

Automate Keyword Research Before Using RankWatch or Any Other Rank Tracker

The way most people do keyword research is fundamentally flawed. 

1. Everyone relies on intuition and their “gut feeling” 
2. Nobody uses data to do keyword research
3. Manually researching keywords can take weeks
4. High-level keyword research can typically only be done by experienced SEOs with a high level of skill
5. It’s difficult to delegate the task to junior SEOs
6. Deliverables are inconsistent from one person to another

At contentdistribution.com, we take a different, data-driven approach. With ClusterAi, we turn keyword research from an unpredictable art to an exact science. 

1. ClusterAi takes data directly from Google, ensuring that your keyword research is based on accurate, relevant, up-to-date information, rather than on what “feels right” 
2. This eliminates any uncertainty, allowing anyone to do expert-level keyword research, even if they have absolutely no previous SEO experience
3. The entire process is fully automated, and you’ll get a comprehensive list of keywords in minutes, instead of weeks
4. The data is sorted by the main keywords and their variations, so you’ll know exactly what keywords to rank for with each page

How We Use ClusterAi with Ahrefs to Generate 1,000+ Unique Content Topics in Minutes

Let us give you an example to show you how easy it is to perform high-quality keyword research with ClusterAi. 

Let’s pretend we’re running a project in the pet niche. The topic we want to cover is dog food, so we need to find keywords that include this search term. 

1. We’ll open up Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and type in “dog” 
2. Then, we’ll select the “Having same terms” feature and include “food”

The tool shows us over 455,000 results for search queries that include “dog + food.”

What we can do is export the top 25,000 keywords, based on their search volume. Now, we just need to import those keywords into ClusterAi and let the tool work its magic. 

Here’s a quick explanation of how ClusterAi works:

1. It scrapes the top ten results on Google for each of the 25,000 keywords
2. It automatically compares all keywords on the list against each other
3. It looks for keywords that share three or more URLs
4. It clusters those keywords together to create unique content topics

The process only takes several minutes, and you’ll have a list of over 1,000 unique topics you can create content around. The data in the list is shown by:

• Main keyword 

• Total search volume 

• Variations 

This is as data-driven as it gets! You’ll know what topics to cover and exactly what keywords you can rank for together to generate the most organic traffic.

Click on any cell in the list above to expand it and see the full list of keyword variations.

That’s literally it. In just minutes, you get a comprehensive list of keywords and their variations, based on raw data from Google. This means that anyone can do perfect keyword research in minutes, every single time, regardless of their experience. 

Did You Find Our RankWatch Review on the First Page of Google?

With ClusterAi and our proven processes, we consistently rank high on Google. Across our projects, we have nearly 100,000 first page keywords. And the best part is — we did it without building backlinks or doing other technical BS.

DoNotPay (B2C SaaS)

Do you want to learn what it takes to consistently rank high on Google? Check out our free guides below:

1. How we crush B2B SaaS SEO
2. How we nail B2C SaaS SEO
3. The fastest way to get outstanding SEO results
4. How Google really works
5. SEO ROI Calculator
6. How to hire the most affordable, highest-quality writers on the internet
7. How to turn any writer into a professional SEO content writer
8. How to rank on the first page of Google without backlinks
9. How to quickly grow your organic traffic with Brand Jacking