Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!
So you’ve done all this great on-page SEO work. You’ve even put effort into building a nice incoming link profile with mentions from relevant and authoritative sites… time to sit back and wait for your rocket-like ascent to the top of the search results right?
Of course not. You have to benchmark your starting point and then monitor your progress in the search results. But that becomes pretty labor intensive with even the most modest keyword lists. Oh, if only there were a tool for checking and tracking search engine results over several pages and keywords…
Enter RankChecker from SEO Book, one of my very favorite SEO tools.
RankChecker allows you to quickly and effectively track your rankings over the big 3 search engines, and guess what? It’s free! You’ll need Firefox to use the tool, but that’s free too – yipee!! I could go on, but why not let Aaron Wall of SEO Book explain it in his own words:
Now, keep in mind that no rank tracking tool is perfect, but the price is right on this one as compared to some of the paid (sometimes very expensive) tools that are not without their issues too. The search engines basically don’t like this kind of program throwing dozens, or perhaps hundreds of search queries at them just to record a position for your site. I would highly recommend setting the delay to at least 2 seconds between queries just to keep everyone happy. I watched someone run it with a zero second delay (basically pinging the search engines with 75 queries simultaneously) and get his IP address banned from Google searches for a while… don’t be that guy.
Also keep in mind that this tool only takes a snapshot of a landscape that is constantly changing. So don’t freak out if it looks like a particular ranking takes a nose dive. Your organic rankings are always fluctuating to some degree. The best way to track them is with a trend line over the long term rather than a day to day panic attack. Just create a list for whatever keywords and websites you’re tracking, save it, and then run the tool at regular intervals. RankChecker will even let you schedule checks and saves your ranking history.
Check it out. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer on a shoestring budget, this tool is a must-have, but it’s pretty invaluable no matter who you are.
