So, SEO analysis is a must for keeping these rankings high. And SEO professionals claim that one of the most needed SEO tasks is keyword analysis. If so, what ranking tool can be practical enough for specialists and beginners at the same time? This full review of the Rank Tracker tool might give you a hint.
A Brief Rank Tracker Overview
What Is Rank Tracker?
Rank Tracker is a keyword ranking tool in an SEO software package called SEO Power Suite by the Link-Assistant.com project. Created in 2009, SEO PowerSuite has gained many positive customer reviews and ratings and proved to be one of the most reliable SEO tools in the market. SEO PowerSuite includes four separate tools:
Rank Tracker Website Auditor SEO SpyGlass Link Assistant
Each tool helps automate SEO analysis with rank monitoring, on-page optimization, backlink research, and link management. You can purchase every tool separately, as standalone software. We said ‘purchase’ — but in fact, Rank Tracker (and all other modules) has a free version. It’s a bit limited but can still be pretty helpful, especially if you are not an SEO pro. With Rank Tracker, you can check keywords rankings and keyword quality for all possible search engines. It allows you to compare a keyword rank to your competitors’, see your competitors’ keywords strategy, find keywords ideas, and analyze their potential. Finally, you can easily integrate data from other popular SEO rank trackers, tools, and services like Google Ads or Google Analytics. Overall, Rank Tracker is a powerful, handy, and fully customizable SEO tool for in-depth keyword analysis, and with its help you can quickly get to the first lines in Google search.
What Can Rank Tracker Do
Keyword rank tracking Keywords quality research Keywords generation tools SERP Analysis Competitors Review and Research Domain strength summary SEO reports
The Review of Rank Tracker Pros and Cons
Rank Tracker Pros
Professional SEO software Best balance between ease of use and functionality Affordable prices Most of the tools available for free Interface well-designed Lots of Help options Google Analytics and Google Search Console integration
Rank Tracker Cons
Installation is required as it is desktop software There might be delays with results showing if your PC is not powerful enough A confusing name similar to other trackers'
As you see, all cons are pretty trifling — not that it all could spoil your experience! It’s more a matter of taste. So let’s now check what users say about the tool and look at their real reviews.
Rank Tracker Reviews
Taking a glance at reviews like “Top SEO tools,” you will obviously find industry giants software like Google Analytics on top positions. Still, it did not prevent a promising Rank Tracker project from getting a considerable number of positive reviews — especially from SEO newcomers. Most of the reviewers like the user-friendly design of the tool and its intuitive layout:
Others note that the tracker’s concept is really straightforward. And, if you have any issues, the company offers training courses and videos — a very nice approach to customer service, nah?
Yes, there are some minor complaints in the reviews, too. Good news: the Rank Tracker team solves the issues really fast. What is better for a customer than quick feedback? Besides, it was really pleasant to see that Rank Tracker doesn’t just fix bugs but also adds new features. For example, after several user requests, they added integration with Google Analytics and Google Ads very soon.
Another nice thing people reasonably mention is the affordable price of Rank Tracker. It’s a pretty common part of some random Rank Tracker review! Still, it would be fair to say that most of the Rank Tracker features are free. A licensed version is great, but it is not essential if you, say, want to optimize your small website slightly.
Rank Tracker Pricing Plans Review
So, we started speaking about the paid version. What’s it like? When it comes to payment plans, Rank Tracker appears to be extremely cheap. Let’s compare some top popular tools: It’s pretty costly, isn’t it? Not speaking of such software as Google Analytics 360 for enterprises with its $12,500/month plan. And what about Rank Tracker? If you want to purchase the full set of tools from SEO PowerSuite, including Rank Tracker, you can choose from the following plans:
The professional package for only $25 per month — what else might an SEO professional want? And, if you purchase only the Rank Tracker, the price becomes even more affordable:
Looking too good to be true? Yeah, some reviewers claim it’s impossible to get full-fledged SEO software for such a price. Still, Rank Tracker and its performance prove the opposite. It really has all the necessary basis for modern SEO — and will have more features in the future. At least, the developers claim so. But does it make sense to purchase the professional package? What’s the overall difference between Rank Tracker’s free and paid options?
Free vs Professional vs Enterprise Versions Review
The pleasant fact about Rank Tracker is that the free version is not limited that much regarding the number of keywords and websites to check. It’s more than enough to evaluate the tool and weigh its pros and cons. It even allows you to start a real project without a subscription. However, a free version is not as convenient as the Professional and Enterprise ones, of course. Rank Tracker Professional version unlocks the features which are not available in a free mode. Strictly speaking, if you are not an SEO specialist, you can easily do without them. For example, you cannot save your project in a free version, but you can copy the data and paste it into an Excel worksheet. Rank Tracker Enterprise version mainly targets SEO agencies that need to provide customers with business reports. So, the Enterprise version has a couple more features that help automate work with loads of data. Still, based on reviews on the Internet, many people buy an Enterprise version for their personal usage, too. Shonuff! Why not get the full potential of software for such a good price?
A Closer Look at Rank Tracker Functions
It seems we have mentioned one of the biggest pros of Rank Tracker — its price. But what’s it about, after all? Let’s get to the juiciest part of our review: a closer look at how Rank Tracker can help you.
Application and User Interface
So, you already know Rank Tracker is a desktop application, not an online tool. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. You can easily download it from the official website. The installation takes as little as a few minutes, and the application is ready to use immediately — no endless extra settings. The user interface is intuitive — even if you know only the basics of SEO and have never used a tool like that. And, what is even greater, Rank Tracker offers plenty of Help topics, videos, and tutorials to use the software at full capacity. All the help topics are available via the Help section in the main menu. All key elements are located in three menus:
The Main Menu (1) contains general settings such as file options, project settings, help, and submenus. The Toolbar (2) contains all Rank Tracker tools for SEO analysis. The Toolbar (3) provides quick access to the most frequent actions: save/open file or enter the license number.
Launching Rank Tracker
When you open Rank Tracker, it will suggest you start a new project by adding a link to a webpage for analysis.
You will see the workspace and all the Rank Tracker tools ready for data analysis when the basic stats is updated. The workspace is easily customized. You can add your filters, rearrange or add new columns, and sort the keywords by selecting the factor you need. Besides, you can choose and add the local search engines and the country (or even the city) you will work with. Just select a specific search engine from the list or enter its name in the search bar:
Rank Tracker Tools Review
Ranking Summary
Before you start working on your project with Rank Tracker, you can check your rank summary first. It will help you create a full project overview and estimate the main criteria. For instance, you can instantly check your site’s visibility in various search engines and overall keyword rankings.
Rank Tracking
The Rank tracking feature allows you to analyze the ranks of certain keywords and see which of them work best. The feature is on the side menu: hit the Rank Tracking button to activate it.
The first thing you see in this workspace is the list of keywords for your webpage, sorted by a search engine rank. This default list already gives a basic understanding of your keywords’ effectiveness. Besides, you can find the number of searches for each particular keyword, its search engine ranks, and keyword visibility. For your convenience, the visibility is marked from good (green) to bad (red). Pretty easy, right? However, the powers of this rank tracking tool are much greater than this. You can add any other factors needed for your analysis by clicking the “Edit visible columns” icon. The menu that appears by selecting this icon shows dozens of factors you can add to your research. For example, you can add a column showing results for alternative search engines, PPC analysis, keyword difficulty, Organic traffic, keyword effectiveness index, and more.
Another helpful toolbar is in the bottom menu. It allows you to evaluate the quality of each keyword separately and compare it with the competitors.
For example, you can evaluate the keyword difficulty for each of the keywords listed:
Keyword difficulty workspace shows whether competing for a rank using a specific keyword is hard. This metric is ranked from 0 to 100, so the 20 key difficulty word should be more preferred than a 90 key difficulty word. The list below the Toolbar shows the competitors who are most likely to get top places in search engines. The great thing is that you can see all the competitors’ links. Already guessed? Yes, you can check their pages to review and analyze their keywords and strategies — a must-have approach for SEO! By the way, you can do a brief check of your competitors right in the Rank Tracker tool. For this, you can use the SERP Details button — it’s in the same Toolbar. This feature is available only in Professional and Enterprise versions and shows the top 30 competitors for each keyword. It will be enough for a pretty thorough analysis — even for the very advanced approaches.
Keyword Map Review
The Keyword Map workspace button is located on the side toolbar under a Rank Track button. The Keyword map gives you a closer look at different analysis types, including PPC, keyword difficulty, and rank analysis.
Keyword Research Review
Keyword Research is a workspace specially constructed to find keyword ideas based on their quality and effectiveness.
Ranking Keywords Review
This module shows the keywords already ranked by Google and gives a summary of the keywords used. Let’s look at it in more detail:
The Keywords Diagram (1) shows the total number of keywords collected. The Organic traffic Diagram (2) shows the number of visitors of the selected web page over the past 30 days. The SERP checking widget shows where the keywords are used more often: educational portals, ads, reviews, news, etc.
Besides, this workspace allows you to adjust a keyword finder tool for desktop or mobile requests and sort them by theme and region. For example, you can set up a workspace to show you a review on mobile requests in India or desktop image requests in the USA.
Keyword Gap Review
The Keyword Gap feature allows you to compare the keywords you use with your direct competitors. You can set up a keyword finder to search for your keywords, your competitor keywords, or use other types of search.
The result shows the parallels and the differences between two or more websites. It can even calculate the estimated cost per click for a certain keyword. Still, don’t rely on it too much — depending on your niche, it’s better to have your own benchmark. Let’s look at the example. Suppose you need to solve the following problem with Rank Tracker: you consider a certain website as your competitor and want to see the exact correlations with your own content. You set up the conditions ‘Your keywords’ and see that your competitor rarely uses your keywords. Then you set up the condition “Competitor keywords” and see that your competitor uses other keywords for top ranking. What will the results mean? It’s easy: you now know that these two websites have similar topics but attract different audiences with different requests. You can use this knowledge for your further content strategies.
Another situation: you are looking for intersections of the commonly used words. In other words, you want to see which keywords work fine for your competitors and which are not. Sometimes the resulting requests are the ones you have not even thought of earlier! For example, they can include misspelled words. A tip: be careful with misspelled words in your content. If you use them, it may negatively affect your site rankings as it directly impacts your page quality. Still, they might give you a fresh idea of the keys that all your competitors target, but you don’t. Overall, using the Keyword Gap, you can develop a strategy against your competitor and collect the keywords with weighted parameters of cost per click, difficulty, and lower competition.
Still, it’s not the only way to analyze your competitors with Rank Tracker. We’ll show you more features further, so read on!
Third Party Analytics Integration Review
Rank Tracker can work together with the most used and powerful analytics services. To be precise, you can connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts to collect keyword suggestions from Google. You may also use your Google Ads to get some ideas from Google Keywords Planner. It’s possible to pick up keyword suggestions based on Autocomplete Tools, Related Searches, Related Questions, or TF-IDF search engine techniques. For example, if you use the Related Questions keyword finder, you will get a list of questions suggested by Google or any other search engine related to this keyword. All these tools can give you inspiration for creating efficient SEO-optimized copy.
Another good inspiration tool is the Keyword Combination Module. It includes Word Mixer, Word Combination, and Misspelled words options. Sometimes it is tough to predict how users enter the text exactly. These tools can suggest some ideas about how Internet users can write your keywords.
You can save all your keywords ideas from a Keyword Research session and store them in the Keyword Sandbox labeled by source. It will help you sum up all your research work, mark the best combinations, and analyze which of the suggestion tools suits you more.
SERP Analysis Review
SERP (Search Engine Results Page) checking tool is available under the SERP Analysis button on the side menu. The Rank Tracker’s SERP checker lists the 50 top-ranking pages for a particular keyword and some useful SEO data for it. To be precise, this data includes keyword difficulty and top page distribution graphs based on predefined parameters. The SERP tracker tool from Rank Tracker is an easy way to understand how to outpace your organic competitors.
Competitors Research Review
Rank Tracker is great when you want to search for a website that competes with you for a search engine rank. Besides the tools we already mentioned, you can use the Competitors Research tab. So what can you analyze with it, and how exactly?
Domain competitors
The Rank Tracker Domain Competitors tool suggests the automatic list of your main competitors. Who are they? Basically, they are the websites with the content in the same niche as yours. By default, the domain list is based on the keyword intersection score between your keywords and your competitor’s keywords. Still, you can change the display parameters as you wish. This workspace also allows you to see your competitors’ domains organic traffic and keywords intersection parameters. The free Rank Tracker version offers only two competitor positions, while the Professional and Enterprise versions allow you to see 90 competitor positions.
Topic Competitors Review
This competitor’s search method allows you to specify exact keywords and find sites similar to yours by specified content. As with the previous method, only two positions are available in the free Rank Tracker version.
Top Pages Review
The Top Pages tool allows you to see the most visited and valuable pages of your website, sorted by organic traffic, traffic value, page in-link rank, or other filters. A tip: analyze your most visited pages and create new content based on this analysis. Besides, make sure these pages have actual and updated content, and that there are no broken URLs.
Domain Strength Module Review
The Rank Tracker Domain Strength Module is a summary workspace that shows general information about your domain. It includes:
General domain info Social media popularity Number of pages indexed in different search engines
Reports Review
The most important stage of any analysis is summarizing the research and finalizing the report. Rank Tracker allows you to use one of the default templates and customize it with the selected metrics. You can choose a predefined template or create a blank one and add the parameters by yourself.
Reports can be published, shared via a link, saved in PDF, and printed.
Printing reports with watermarks are available for both Professional and Enterprise versions of Rank Tracker. And you have access to saving, emailing, and scheduling reports only in the Enterprise Version.
Review Summary
As you can see, the basics of your work with Rank Tracker can be easily explained in a few minutes. It makes Rank Tracker a godsend for SEO newcomers. It has a user-friendly interface, many tutorials, help materials, and a convenient design. SEO professionals will also find this tool really practical. Cheap, easy to use, and has all the necessary features for advanced optimization — a real gem! To sum up this review: can we say that Rank Tracker is one of the most practical modern SEO tools for today? With its balance between price, sound design, and functionality – yes, it is!
