Best rank checking tool of 2024 - TechRadar
The best rank checking tools make it simple and easy for you to monitor your keyword rankings and help increase traffic to your website.
The ability to rank well for your keywords on search engines is an essential part of SEO. Although it's possible to casually monitor a small number of these with manual searches, keyword ranking tools are essential for serious work.
This isn't just because they're much faster, even with a large number of keywords (although that helps.) With the ever-increasing use of personalized data and customization of results, along with the rise of local searches, it's impossible to get a proper idea of how well-represented your website is for your target keywords with anything other than software.
The best rank checking tools won't stop at just your keyword positions, but also provide additional information. This can highlight changes over time, filters by keyword volume, and more, all helping you understand your keyword rankings, and to target the areas of your website that will benefit the most from improvements.
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Best SERP checker
SEMrush offers a full-suite SEO platform, with features covering competitor research, keyword research, link building, on-page SEO, as well as a comprehensive rank checking tool with many advanced features.
Multiple keyword lists can be created to track rankings on different Google search geolocations, and Baidu. This translates to you can track either a single or multiple websites across just one or multiple territories, which is handy when managing different clients who may have markets either in specific countries or worldwide.
The ranking information provided doesn't just include positions and historical data, but also incorporates symbols to communicate if your listing is a featured snippet, includes sitelinks, and whether the results feature images, reviews, knowledge panel results, as well as Google Ads on top or bottom of the results.
Listings for keywords being tracked also include estimated search volumes, which allows you to gauge traffic and estimate changes to this as your keyword ranking changes. Various date filters can also track changes over time, with another filter for sorting keywords according to the biggest gains or falls, allowing you to better manage your keyword targeting.
Overall, SEMrush provides a superb rank checker that allows you to track and manage your keywords in a comprehensive way.
The bottom tier Pro plan starts at around $120 per month, although you can try it out for free.
Read our full SEMrush review.
Best position tracker
Ahrefs is largely focused on link building, but it also offers a capable rank checker to ensure that you know which keywords and pages to build links for in order to help improve those rankings.
The rank checker reports details including position, traffic estimates, and listings features you might have such as sitelinks and featured listing. You can monitor individual keyword progress over time, along with a value for keyword difficulty.
The last part is totally at the heart of the Ahrefs ranking checker, in that it doesn't just seek to show what rankings you have, but encourages you to more aggressively claim even more. This is underlined not only in the keyword difficulty score, but also by a chart. This ends up displaying both your current positions, plus additional space in the ranking results that you can aim to compete more effectively for.
As with SEMrush, you can perform analysis of competitor SEO, keywords, and rankings, but Ahrefs makes it more of the regular routine of your campaign management.
This all contributes to making the Ahrefs rank checker a more ideal tool for those looking to more aggressively target keyword rankings, rather than simply observe current positions, as part of a general SEO and marketing strategy.
The pricing starts with the Lite plan at around $100 per month.
Read our full Ahrefs review.
Best rank checker
Moz is an established SEO platform offering toolkits such as site audits, keyword research, backlink analysis, and not so surprisingly, a rank checker.
The rank checker offers a familiar, easy-to--use graphical user interface that will be recognizable to anyone who uses Google Analytics. It's easy to use, and covers the basics, with ranking tables, charts showing movement over time, and general summaries of changes. This is likely to be enough for many users, although more demanding types may find it a little limiting by comparison to SEMrush and Ahrefs.
What Moz does, though, is pack a secret punch by offering stats tracking from STAT. This is a far more detailed and advanced rank checker, which allows for tracking of millions of keywords, as well as changes through the day and by geolocations. STAT is also more complex to use, but it's good to know the option for STAT is there if the simpler Moz reports aren't enough.
Read our full Moz Pro review.
Best keyword tracker
Serpstat started as a keyword research tool in 2013, and subsequently grew into an all-in-one SEO platform a few years later. While it is not the powerful tool with the most features, it compensates for this with its affordable price tag. The formula must be working as it counts in its client list Samsung, Uber, and Shopify.
The feature list includes over 30 tools for SEO and PPC professionals. These include batch analysis of keywords and domains (up to 100,000 key keywords at once), a rank tracking tool, a site audit tool and text analytics. Synthesizing so much data can be accomplished via custom reports. Popular keywords, by the region can be exported, and then ads based off of these can be tied in.
Pricing starts at $50 a month (paid annually) for the Lite plan, which limits you to 100 searches a day and 10,000 rank position checks a month. Higher plans lift those limits significantly and add extra features, and there's a custom plan for the most demanding customers.
Read our full Serpstat review.
Best rank analysis
ProRankTracker is a tool developed just for the job of tracking and analyzing keyword rankings, and then allowing users to sift through the data for insights. As well as the rank checking tools, it's as much as an analytics and reporting platform, too.
The tracking feature allows you to track rankings, with automated daily updates, as well as to cater to on demand requests, so you can check your rankings as needed. International tracking also gets support across various search engines, including results for both desktop and mobile where different, along with local tracking options.
ProRankTracker's analytics section allows you to take a deep dive into your rankings, not just for your targeted keywords, but also for other keyword searches that you're coming up in. This is a great little function to help you take better control of your targeting and positioning, such as by building on an existing strong page for your call to action.
As well as various reporting filters and options, there's also the ability to set up notifications in case of significant ranking changes you may need to know about. Additionally, reports are white-labeled so an SEO or SEO agency can share reporting data with clients, exporting them as XLSX, PDF, or CSV, or alternatively simply copying them to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Drive accounts.
Overall, while ProRankTracker isn't quite on the same level as more comprehensive SEO toolkits, it does stay focused very well on all aspects of keyword rankings and analysis that most users and clients will need to know.
Read our full ProRankTracker review.
Best insight tool
Advanced Web Ranking is a dedicated ranking tool that stays firmly fixated on that one task, rather than being bundled as part of a SEO software platform. The positive of this is that it can cover pretty much everything you need a ranking checker to do, but the negative is that this makes it less useful for additional SEO needs such as for keyword research.
What it does do, though, it does well, and even better is that it's an easy to use platform that is intuitive to use. While there are a lot of different options and features available, users aren't likely to feel overwhelmed as the basic defaults are pretty standard for most needs. Those with more have the option to change and develop them as required.
Advanced Web Ranking provides all the essentials you would expect in a keyword ranking checker, such as automated and on-demand updates, mobile and local options, as well as different SERP features tracked. Additionally, there are no limits on the number of ranking projects, which is welcome.
There are a number of reporting templates and quick reporting options available. However, there are also custom reporting options which means your data and layout is fully customizable, using a straight-forward WYSIWYG editor, making it easy to format for clients. There are easy sharing options as well as integrations with third-party reporting tools as required.
Another feature is the ability to do a competitor analysis, by tracking how competing websites perform and how the websites you are tracking do so by comparison. You can then aggregate performance metrics and perform longer term SERP analysis for a wider context.
Altogether, Advanced Web Ranking is a very accessible and competent rank checking tool that not only covers all of the important bases but also makes it easy to generate reports. The only negative is the lack of accompanying tools to work alongside it.
Read our full Advanced Web Ranking review.
Better understand your visitor stats with our guide to the best on-page SEO analytics tools.
Rank checking tool FAQs
Which rank checking tool is best for you?
When deciding which rank checking tool to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes cheaper software may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a paid platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, higher-end software usually come with with a comprehensive range of additionally useful SEO tools, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require from your rank checking tool.
How we tested the best rank checking tools
To test for the best rank checking tools we first set up an account with the relevant provider, then we tested the service to see how well it could track rankings across a range of search engines, geolocations, and other important criteria. The aim was to push each platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools for general rank checking purposes.
Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
We've also listed the best free SEO keyword research tools.
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