Domain Magnate

Over the last couple weeks I’ve searching and testing various tools and software that help check and track ranks in Google mostly, but also in Yahoo and Bing. Anyone who does any SEO at all knows how important it is to check your serps from time to time to be able to see the results of your seo campaigns and link building methods. Most people naturally do it manually by going to google and checking the main terms to see if their site ranks there. Which is a fine way to do it, but can get rather time consuming if you have many keywords, many sites and most of them aren’t on the first page.

So that’s what the rank tracking software is for. And there is plenty of different types of software to do just this task, most popular are likely Market Samurai and Rank Tracker by Link Assistant. Besides the option to check your serps quickly Market Samurai also help with SEO competition analysis, finds more keywords and list and many more features. They also offer a free trial for 40 days during which you can buy it for $97 – compared to the regular price of $147. It’s a decent piece of software, but has lots of unrequired features if all you want is check your serps. Link Assistant Rank Tracker is a pretty good piece of SEO equipment that also comes with a free trial and costs a similar amount $99.75. It’s relatively easy to use and provides all the needed data.

However paying nearly $100 for something simple to check your serps might seem a bit excessive. A cheaper and good alternative is SheerSEO – they provide a 90 days free trial and their paid plans start from only $7 per month, allowing to track 20 keywords. However the main problem with it is that it’s only good for one site and if you want to track more you’ll need to buy more licenses. Besides the tracking serps they also claim to provide some monthly backlinks and directory submissions.

And finally there exist quite a few free options, both web based – such as SEOSerp and Ventio SE and Desktop software like the Free Monitor For Google – the easiest and best option for tracking serps. Free, unlimited sites, keywords and queries and very easy to use. This is a perfect option for beginners as it’s very straightforward and comfortable. Being able to also check yahoo and bing rankings would be nice, but the truth is who really cares? Officially Google has about 70% of the market, but from my own stats for my sites which rank #1 in google, yahoo and bing – Google brings over 10 times more traffic when the rest and when competing for highly targeted, but low volume keywords all the other search engines only bring negligible traffic.

I’ve been using the free monitor for a few days and despite it being free it seems to be doing its job. No need to get obsessed over your backlinks, rankings and kinds of made up metrics and various sites offer, or check your competitors in depth. All any real SEO needs from a keyword tracking tool is just to be able to see if the recent link building efforts helped improve the serps. If yes do more of what worked, if not – try other methods.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 9:54 am and is filed under Development, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.