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As businesses attempt to develop exciting and engaging content to promote their products and services, it’s important for them to understand how that content is performing and if it’s positively affecting their websites’ current internet traffic. To analyze their performance and develop strong SEO practices, companies often rely on various tools and software options, such as an SEO rank tracker. SEO rank trackers are powerful tools that provide companies with an abundance of information they can use to better their SEO strategies and marketing endeavors.

What Is an SEO Rank Tracker?

An SEO rank tracker is a tool you can use to monitor how your website is performing on search engines. It often tracks and analyzes the organic position of your website in search engine result pages (SERPs) based on keyword searches. These SERPs can help you figure out your website’s current rank and your content’s effect on its internet traffic. Essentially, rank trackers take a set of keywords that relate to your brand, company, or marketing campaign and analyze search engines to determine where users would find a link to your website if they searched for those keywords.

Let’s say your company sells rechargeable flashlights. The SEO rank tracker could help you see what customers would find if they searched for phrases such as “energy-efficient flashlight”, “best rechargeable flashlight,” or “reliable flashlight.” The rank tracker would then inform you about your website’s position for the varying search results.

For example, when analyzing the keyword phrase “energy-efficient flashlight,” the software would determine your website’s position in the SERPs and inform you how far users have to scroll or how many clicks they have to make before they find it. The higher your keyword ranks, the closer your website link will be to the top of the search engine results. Rank trackers can also provide you with data on where users can find your website if they perform an image search, video search, news search, and more.

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Why Should I Use an SEO Rank Tracker?

SEO rank trackers provide beneficial support to companies and organizations, enabling them to make important decisions that can help their businesses flourish. By using SEO rank tracking software, you can easily identify key performance indicators (KPI) to better understand how your company should adjust its marketing or content creation.

As you generate content and develop SEO strategies to market your company or business, SEO rank trackers can help provide insight into and understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. When you launch new content, rank trackers can help you monitor and adjust your website’s performance by seeing which blogs or articles are delivering the most benefit to your customer outreach. For example, if you use your rank tracker and discover that certain keywords are trending, you can develop content based on those keywords to increase your organic traffic.

Rank trackers can also help notify you if your website has dropped its position on one or multiple search engines. While using SEO strategies, or in between major marketing campaigns, receiving an immediate alert when your rankings drop can help you make fast decisions to increase them again. Let’s say your website ranking has slipped from the ninth to the 11th position, which means your website is now on the second page of most search engines. From receiving the rank tracker’s alert, you can quickly generate more content or search for underdeveloped keywords to help boost traffic.

You can also use rank trackers to help you follow competitors and monitor their traffic. Understanding how your competitors are performing can help you make informed decisions about your own marketing and content strategies, which can help make them more effective. For example, if you generate content for the same type of keywords as your competitor, but your competitor still ranks higher, you can examine their content to see why they’re outperforming you.

It’s possible they use their keywords more frequently throughout their pieces or that they include additional or more relevant information. Having these types of insights can help you make adjustments to your own content and increase your website’s ranking and internet traffic.

When Should I Use an SEO Rank Tracker?

Whenever they start a new marketing campaign or establish goals to improve their customer outreach, it’s important for companies and businesses to use SEO rank tracking software to monitor their progress. Understanding how your keyword-targeting actions interact with organic search engine traffic can help you make better decisions about your content creation. For example, if you create several articles targeting phrases such as “best food processors,” but your website’s performance doesn’t increase, you can analyze those articles to see where you can make adjustments for future content creation.

Rank trackers can provide you with more than just monitoring, though; they can also help you identify the keywords to target. For example, if you notice an article titled “7 Ways to Improve Productivity” has generated an impressive amount of clicks, it’s important to identify whether the targeted keywords were “improving productivity,, “better work ethic,” or “tips for being productive.” Using  SEO rank tracking software can help you determine which of those keywords or phrases connect with the productivity article and help you target them more effectively.

When targeting keywords, many companies and businesses include the keywords throughout the blog or article as well as in the article’s title. However, if a company wants to attract the attention of users, it’s important for them to not only add the keywords to the title but also make it interesting and engaging. CopyPress offers a great eBook to help you develop your content’s titles and make them more noticeable to readers. Sign up for the eBook today and start writing compelling headlines.

How to Use an SEO Rank Tracker

Before diving into the world of SEO rank tracking, it’s important to know the best ways to use the software. Having a clear understanding of what the software can do and how to best prepare for it can enable you to hit the ground running and establish an efficient and effective SEO marketing campaign. Following are some steps to using an SEO rank tracker.

1. Identify Keywords

Before using a rank tracking tool, it’s important to perform research and understand the major keywords that affect your business’s overall traffic. Depending on the size of your website or SEO campaign, the number of keywords you need to target can vary. If you’re a smaller business, it’s possible you might track fewer search terms, ranging anywhere from 10 to 200. However, if you’re a larger business with a lot of content, you might need to identify  500 keywords or more. The three main types of keywords you should find include:

  • Keywords mentioning every product or service you offer.
  • Keywords mentioning your brand or company name.
  • The top-performing keywords from your website that are creating the most organic traffic.

Many of these keywords you can determine through experience or general understanding of your company. However, it can also be helpful to use services, such as Google Search Console, to get a better idea of the keywords currently linked to your website and their ranking.

2. Select a Rank Tracking Tool

There are many rank tracking tools and software options you can use to help you monitor your website’s performance and develop a better understanding of the top-performing or underperforming keywords. However, it’s important to find software that includes all the features your company or business requires in generating effective content. Some of the most useful features that SEO rank tracking tools can provide include:

  • Historical data, which enables you to research keywords and their performance over the years.
  • Accurate keyword positions to help you  clearly understand your content’s achievements.
  • Data that can show you how keyword rankings influence your organic traffic.
  • Search volumes, which show companies how many people searched for a keyword during a specific time.
  • Potential organic traffic that can help you understand different ways to achieve a higher website ranking.

3. Add Keywords to the Software

Once you’re selected software to use, it’s important to upload your keywords so the rank tracker can start monitoring the software’s performance. Most rank tracking software gives you the ability to add the keywords manually to the tracking software, and some even enable you to organize the keywords into sections or groups to make rank tracking more efficient. Once you add the keywords, the software then gets to work by analyzing search engine results and generating performance information. After a little bit of time, the SEO rank tracker can give you a preliminary look into how your website is currently performing.

4. Analyze the Performance

After gathering enough information from different search engines, it’s good to analyze your website’s performance to help you understand where you can improve certain areas of your content generation and organic traffic. While analyzing your SEO campaigns and their performance, it’s helpful to look at different areas and facets of your website. For example, reviewing data from different groups of keywords can help you determine which group is performing the best and help you understand why others are underperforming.

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5. Make Adjustments

Once you’ve analyzed your website’s ranking and have a better understanding of how your content is affecting traffic, it’s helpful to make any necessary adjustments to improve your SEO campaigns. Using the previous example of different keyword groups, let’s say that keyword groups involving your brand-name products are outperforming your other groups that focus on giving consumers information. If that’s the case, it’s possible your brand-name products generate enough traffic on their own, and you can develop stronger content for your other keyword groups to increase your website’s overall traffic and ranking.

Using the SEO rank tracker, you can make those adjustments while continuing to analyze your website’s performance. If you notice an increase in keyword rankings, you know your adjustments are working. However, if nothing changes, you might want to consider reanalyzing and making different modifications.

Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools for Keyword Tracking

When you’re attempting to increase your website’s traffic, it’s understandable that you’d want the best rank tracking software available to you. There are several SEO rank trackers that can provide you with amazing tools to benefit your marketing strategies, especially when it comes to keyword tracking. Some of those rank trackers are:


MonsterInsights is one of the most useful SEO rank trackers for those who use WordPress because it enables you to monitor keyword tracking inside your WordPress dashboard. The software works directly with Google Analytics to provide you with real-time data and monitoring, which can help you make informed decisions about your content creation. The software also provides you with additional features, which include:

  • Showing the average click-through-rate (CTR).
  • Helping you track clicks on external links and advertisements.
  • Enabling you to track searches, authors, tags, and more.
  • Helping you quickly optimize low-ranking keywords to improve performance.


Semrush is a rank tracking tool that also provides other SEO features that effectively help you improve your website’s performance. Using the software’s abilities, you can track your website’s keyword rankings and understand the ranking distribution over a period of time. It also enables you to see the search terms in the top 3, 10, 20, and 100 keyword rankings.

However, one of the biggest functions that Semrush provides is its ability to track the keyword rankings of competitors. You can add 10 URLs to the software, and it will track those sites’ performance and rankings, helping you develop new SEO strategies and create more popular content.

SERPWatcher by Mangools

Mangools creates several SEO tools that help businesses track their keyword rankings, including SERPWatcher by Mangools. SERPWatcher enables companies to track search engine result pages for certain keywords and see how they affect their website’s performance. When operating the software, users just need to enter their websites along with any keywords they’re hoping to analyze. It then generates information on the website and each of its keywords, including search volume, estimated monthly visitors, change in positions, and more. Mangools also provides individuals with other SEO software options from its toolkit that, when used together, can help them develop powerful SEO strategies.


Serpstat is a helpful tool that provides users with a full SEO toolkit to help them with their website ranking and content generation. The software gives companies a nice dashboard where they can view their keyword and ranking data using helpful visuals, such as easy-to-read graphs and charts. The software not only helps monitor keywords but also gives businesses the ability to perform influential keyword research and see how their keywords compare to competitors.

However, compared to other SEO rank tracking software, Serpstat can sometimes have a learning curve for new users as they try to navigate its numerous features and functions.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking provides companies with a helpful tool that enables its users to track a website’s search terms on different search engines and sites, including Google, Bing, YouTube, Yahoo, and more. The software also enables businesses to monitor keywords based on geographical location and devices and then use that information to improve other areas of their marketing. For example, if a company isn’t generating a lot of business in southern states, it can focus content and keywords on those areas.

SE Ranking also enables its users to track the performance of competitors, analyze their own traffic, and measure the potential of their SEO campaigns.


Ahrefs is a powerful SEO marketing platform that can help companies develop content that targets keywords more effectively. Using the software, businesses can either track their websites or connect Ahrefs with their Google Search Console accounts. Then, from the Ahrefs dashboard, users can add more keywords and see the overview of their search engine rankings. They can also view additional details about keywords, including their difficulty, search volume, and current position. Ahrefs can also view the performance of up to 10 competing businesses.

What Do the Search Terms in the SEO Ranking Report Mean?

The search terms that are displayed in SEO ranking reports are the keywords people use to search for specific information. For example, if someone wanted to find a new pillow, they might search for “most comfortable pillow” or “best pillow for a good night’s sleep.” These phrases are the keywords the SEO ranking report generates to help companies and businesses understand what their consumers are searching for and how to attract their attention.

The SEO ranking report often lists the search terms in numerical order, which displays their current rank and popularity. That popularity can change depending on the number of times users searched for the keywords, how much traffic the keywords generated for a business’s website, and the current number of search results that appear when the keywords are used.

If a company wanted to use those search terms to increase their traffic, it could generate interesting content that targets those keywords in hopes they would organically appear on a SERP and engage the user. Through this content, the business can then create additional links that lead users to other areas of the website or company and generate interest and revenue. Some companies even hire professional content marketers, such as CopyPress, to help them create content that can help their marketing endeavors.

Understanding how to use SEO rank trackers and create this type of content can be very beneficial to companies and businesses as they focus on increasing customer outreach and developing fresh ways to promote their brand and services. If you’re developing your own brand and hoping to improve your website’s ranking and organic traffic, consider using rank trackers to help you analyze your SEO campaigns and make informed marketing decisions.

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