One of the things I find myself doing the most is checking my keywords rankings on the search engines (mainly Google). Since I started doing SEO I used several keyword tracking tools for this purpose but only one really took first place for me.

As we all know good things don’t last long that and that tool (which you will find out about later) stopped working as good as it did for various reasons and I found myself frustrated from the poor performance. That caused me to start looking for an alternative and here are all the keyword tracking tools I found and tested.

I managed to find a new tool to use after doing this little keyword tracking tools roundup and I’m sure that you will find the best keyword tracking tool for you among this list and I hope that it will help you save the time it would take you to do the research yourself.

I also thought that I should compare the results I get from each tool and provide you with a screenshot showing my results and the tools interface. So I picked 5 keywords that I have first page rankings for and searched for their rankings on all the following tools.

SEOBook’s Rank Checker

SEOBook’s Rank Checker is a free tool that all of you Firefox users can take advantage of. It comes as part of SEOBook’s free SEO Toolbar. Very simple to use, just enter the domain and keywords and you will be able to see the keywords ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can also save your searches and export the results to CSV.

Web CEO

Web CEO is a complete SEO software that has plenty of features inside. I have only checked the ranking feature of the software but you can feel free to test everything yourself. It comes with a 15 day trial in which you will have access to all the features it has to offer.

Web CEO supports almost 800 different search engines which I guess is cool and some might find useful. For me, all I need is the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). With the free version you will only be able to track rankings for up to 2 sites.

I didn’t seem to find a graph view of the rankings which is something I was expecting to find. Here are my results:

CuteRank

CuteRank is a keyword rank checker tool designed to automatically check keyword positions and track keyword ranking performance on multiple search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing (MSN), Ask, and AOL.

The free version will only allow you to add one site to the tool but that is enough to test it out and decided if this is the keyword ranking tool you want to go with. As you can see in the image below it separates the rankings with colors for different position range and it also has a graph view which will help you see your ranking changes over time.

It support scheduling so it can update your rankings automatically on a daily basis which I find to be awesome and a must have in such a tool. No need to remember to update it manually. Just set the schedule and check your rankings whenever you want to.

Here are my results as seen on CuteRank:

Market Samurai

I assume most of you heard about Market Samurai before as it is much more than a keyword ranking tool and a very popular keyword research tool. With that said, the Rank Tracker module of Market Samurai is probably the module I have been using the most. This is the tool I used the most and mentioned in the beginning but recently it’s not working as smoothly as it used to for various reasons.

It also doesn’t have an automated update feature so every time I want to update my rankings I need to enter and click on update rankings. Very annoying. Except from showing you the rankings it also tracks the number of backlinks and PR of the ranked pages and has a graph view so you can see the progress of your rankings over time. One feature that Market Samurai does have that I didn’t see in the other tools is the ability to track keyword rankings for more than one domain under the same project.

You will need to get the full version of Market Samurai in order to use the rank tracker module as after the trial period will end you will only have access to the keyword research module.

Here are my results from Market Samurai:

Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker by Link Assistant is probably the tool most will be familiar with from all the others I mention here. With the free version you won’t be able to save your data so closing the software means you will lose all of it. Also, if you will decided to purchase the pro version (like I did) you need to know that you are only going to get 6 months (I got only 3) subscription to the Rank Tracker Professional Live! Plan. That means that after 3 months you will need to extend your plan in order to be able to keep using it and track rankings.

The reason I mention this is because I failed to understand that when I purchased it and it kind of pissed me off to learn that the $99.75 purchase was only good for 3 months (now it is good for 6 months). Extending the! Live Plan will cost another $50 for 12 months.

Aside from that Rank Tracker is a solid tool with loads of features and it also supports tracking on autopilot which is AWESOME. You can also connect it to your Google Analytics account, track your competition rankings, it supports almost 800 search engines, get keyword suggestions, watch your rankings progress in graphs view and more.

Here are the results for my keywords:

SEO Keyword Ranking

SEO Keyword Ranking is a web based service that offers a 14 day trial and has 3 membership levels. You will need to follow the signup process which includes setting up the PayPal payment which will only be taken from your account after the 14 day trial in case you didn’t cancel it.

You can set it up to automatically update the rankings once a week or once a month and I would have loved to see an option to set it for once a day. You also get the ranking report to your email which is pretty cool.

Here are my results:

Keyword Envy

Keyword Envy is another web based tool that comes with a 30 day free trial that doesn’t require you to provide any form of payment up front.

You can also try their free rank checker that you can see on the home page but that doesn’t look anything like what you will find inside. Keyword Envy has some additional features which will allow you to view the competition rankings and track leads & sales conversions which is not something I am looking for but I figure others might find it useful. You can also integrate it with Google Analytics

I didn’t really like the interface of Keyword Envy and it also seemed to take the longest time to get the results for my selected keywords. As you will be able to see in the image below of my partial results Keyword Envy takes forever to update (2 days and only 4 keywords out of 15 got updated). I don’t like the interface and I don’t like how slow it is and I can’t understand how they are charging money for such a service.

SEO Rank Monitor

SEO Rank Monitor is a web based tool and it comes with a 30 day free trial that will require you to connect it to PayPal in order to open an account. That is not a big deal since you can always cancel your PayPal subscription prior to day 30 and no money will be taken from your account.

You can also track your competitors and connect it to your Google Analytics account in order to find out which keywords are really worth optimizing. It seems that the data is being updated once a day with you needing to do anything which as I’m sure you already figured out is pretty great.

Here are my results:

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking seems like a serious tool that does a lot more than just track keyword rankings. It is a complete SEO software that will provide you with information about rankings, links and analytics.

Again, I am not going to review this tool and cover all features as I am only interested in the keyword tracking feature for the proposes of this roundup.

Advanced Web Ranking is a software that you will need to install on your PC or Mac and something I really liked about it is that is supports automated keyword tracking so you can tell it to update your rankings on a daily basis. The only drawback is that you will need to setup a password for you Windows User for this feature to work.

You can produce a variety of reports with this tool and here are the results for my keywords:

SERP Tracker

SERP Tracker is a web based tool that is quite simple looking. After you signup for the free account you will be able to track up to 2 domains and up to 10 searches for each domain. You just need to add your URL and than start adding searches. This is different than other tools as for each search you will enter the keyword and the search engine you would like to get the ranking for. This means that if you want to track the rankings of a single keyword on the 3 major search engines that will count as 3 searches out of the allowed 10 you get with a free account.

The rankings are updated on a daily basis which is cool since you don’t need to do anything. Since this tool didn’t seem to be worth the money for getting an upgraded membership I won’t be able to show you the rankings of all the keywords on all the 3 search engines so Bing has been left out.

I won’t recommend you use SERP Tracker mainly because it is very slow and as you can see in the image below, 2 days were not enough time to update all the keywords.

Rankings Comparison

Here is a table showing the Google rankings from all the tools for my 5 keywords:

As you can probably see, there is quite a big difference in the rankings between the different tools and I really don’t know how to explain that. I guess some tools use different sources to get their data and the ranking data is influenced by a number of factors. If any of you have a better explanation than please let me know about it.

Keyword Tracking Tools Roundup Conclusion

So there you have it. The 10 keyword tracking tools I used and tested.

From the tools above I can only recommend CuteRank for those on a tight budget and Rank Tracker for those that have a bigger budget and/or are looking for some more features than just tracking keyword rankings.

If you already own Market Samurai than you are probably using their Rank Tracker module but trust me, it is a whole new world using a tool that updates your rankings on auto pilot.

To your success (and mine ),

Tagged as: CuteRank, Keyword Tracking, Keyword Tracking Tools, Link Building, Rank Tracker, Search Engine Rankings, SERP