Best Rank Trackers

I’ve spent the past several weeks testing out every rank tracking tool that I could find. It’s 2020, and there are a lot of them. This article is the first in a series that I’m calling tactical buyers guides. My goal is to give you the full story — ranging from how the technology works, to who it’s for, and most importantly, what you should use it for. The first section is largely philosophical and instructional....

Accuranker is one of the more popular rank trackers within the professional SEO community. Lots of agencies and in-house SEOs that I know swear by it. The interface is broken into a series of screens, each with varying levels of configurability, and complexity. The table views are configurable in that they allow you to select which columns show, but are not able to be re-ordered. Filters can be applied and saved as new segments, which can then be applied across most screens and reports....

I used AWR for a number of years before Google Search Console debuted. Back then, AWR was downloadable client-side software, and I rented proxies in order to avoid getting blocked by Google. Nearly every one of my pro-SEO contacts from 2007 to 2013 or so was using AWR, almost exclusively (most of us from the recommendation of Aaron Wall). Going into this, I had a lot of faith in the team....

It might be unfair to Agency Analytics to include them in a rank tracker buyers guide because rank tracking is just the tiniest piece of what they do. It’s popular software though, and through my own research I continually saw it recommended on Reddit and other places for people looking for rank tracking solutions. For that reason, I think it’s fair to include them, even though they really don’t have any chance at being one of the better options — mostly because they’re not trying to be....

Ahrefs is one of my most used tools, but I rarely use the rank tracking capabilities. Most of my usage is centered around competitor research, and I don’t think there is a better tool on the market today. I think that you should have an Ahrefs subscription, but I do not think that you should use their rank tracker tool for the tactical approach I laid out in the top section of this article....

Authority Labs used to be one of the larger service providers for rank tracking. They were always a tad on the expensive side, but they were reliable, legit, and had a really great API. The product was acquired a while back and seems to not have been improved in quite some time, and compared to other rank trackers, it’s really not up to snuff. I imagine that most of the enterprise level API users are still hanging around because they’ve got legacy tools that rely on the data, but in pretty much every way, there are better options today....

For most people, their journey into SEO begins with Moz. Maybe they’re working on a product, editorial, or engineering team and have some requirements to start paying attention to SEO. I think Moz is a great tool for these people, but it’s not a tool for serious SEOs looking to do campaign oriented rank tracking. After signing up, the tool does a good job of pulling in competitors. I didn’t really have to make any edits here....

Nightwatch isn’t like most other rank tracking tools — it’s more of a data visualization suite with some sensible defaults for rank tracking. Pretty much everything you see is configurable, and that’s because for the most part, you’re just looking at pre-created reports. The product shots on the marketing pages show robust dashboards populated with a multitude of traffic, rankings, and backlink data, sliced several ways. So while you can connect Nightwatch to Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, I didn’t....

Pro Rank Tracker has been recommended to me several times, and to be fair, I have used it in the past and it’s been a solid and reliable option. The problem is, it doesn’t really stack up to the competition anymore. It’s not particularly intuitive, or attractive, and it doesn’t offer any non-obvious features that competitors don’t do, often in better ways. I was unhappy to find that competitor analysis is really just looking at the cached serp results for each keyword....

Rank Ranger is a service that does pretty much everything you’d expect it to. Somehow, they’re able to integrate a ton of different services and reports without making SEO feel like an afterthought. I didn’t test out any of the SEM, or social, or other integrations, as my needs are still just for rank tracking. To get the most out of Rank Ranger you need to be creating custom graphs, widgets, and reports, most of which I can’t be bothered with....