If we had to pick one North Star Metric for SEO, it would be rankings—not traffic, not backlinks, and certainly nothing like “Domain Authority.”
That’s what brought us to Ranktracker. We were looking for SERP tracking tools that gave us just a bit more than the basics and ended up discovering something far more than that. It’s an all-in-one SEO tool that gives you a little of everything.
Wondering whether it’s worth it? This Ranktracker review from Cerebrum will cover its main features, pricing, and pros and cons so you can make a decision.
Ranktracker is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps website owners monitor the rankings of their keywords across several domains. And if you’re trying to be competitive in your market, it’s great for tracking your performance against competitors.
While the tool is useful for any website, local businesses and local SEO specialists might appreciate it the most given that it allows you to analyze and track keywords at the city and regional level.
Being an all-in-one tool, they have more features than what initially meets the eye.
Domain Tracking
Monitor several of your domains at once
Keyword Tracking
Track the daily movement of up to 4000 keywords.
Use keyword recommendations from Ranktracker, add them manually, or upload via CSV
Search Engine Tracking
Track your position on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Device Tracking
Monitor web and mobile searches separately
Worldwide Data
Track data from over 100,000 locations from the country to the city level.
Supports keyword data for multiple languages as well.
Competitive Analysis
Monitor up to 20 competitor domains for each of your domains.
Main Dashboard
Includes metrics on: Average search position, estimated organic traffic, SERP features, positional distribution, share of voice.
Custom Reporting
Filter for date ranges (1 day to 1 year).
Toggle based on device type
Filter for keywords or groups of keywords.
Rankings
See which of your pages rank for the keywords you choose. Also track how your pages’ rankings change daily, weekly and monthly.
Analyze all your page movements in aggregate too with tables and graphs.
Cost Analysis
View cost-per-click data and estimate the money saved by using organic search rather than PPC search ads.
Keyword Discovery
Find all keywords your site ranks for.
Sharing
Export data in CSV or Excel. Generate view-only reports to share with your clients or the rest of your team.
Backlinks & Technical SEO
Backlink Monitor
Instant analysis on your backlinks and tracks your performance over time.
Backlink Checker
See all your competitors’ backlinks and understand their backlink profiles so you can find new opportunities.
Website Audit
Identifies technical issues with your website
Ranktracker also includes an AI writing feature for an extra fee per article.
For a small business owner dabbling with their website, Ranktracker is extremely affordable. Their Starter plan is priced at $16.80/month, billed yearly.
After using the tool for a bit, it’s quite likely that larger websites will want the benefit of the other plans. The main limiting factors here are daily tracked keywords and competitors per domain.
All in all, Ranktracker’s pricing is quite fair. Especially when you compare them to the biggest tools on the market.
All those features sound good in theory, but how do they work in practice? Let’s walk through the steps of setting up a project on Ranktracker so that you can track the performance of your domain.
After you make your account, you’ll be greeted with this in the main dashboard.
Click “Set up” to start adding a new domain (also called a project) to Ranktracker.
The UI is pretty simple here. Just add any website that you want to track. We won’t use any website we own for privacy reasons, but it’s pretty cool that they give us the ability to analyze other websites too.
You also have the option to add your Google My Business (GMB) profile and monitor your backlinks. Backlinks are essential to SEO, so we’ll toggle that one on.
Tracking your GMB is pretty useful for local businesses and is not a particularly common feature in SEO tools. That said, local SEO isn’t really our specialty so we won’t cover it here.
Next, you’ll be directed to start adding keywords to track.
There is a lot to see here. You can select keywords manually, from Ranktracker’s suggested keywords that you see in the bottom left, or upload a CSV with a list of your own keywords.
If you look at the upper right, you need to select which search engines and devices you want to track. Seems unorthodox, but it’s valuable because you get insights into more obscure parts of Google like Google Places. You also need to select both desktop and mobile if you want to see the full results.
There is a small caveat here. To track a keyword on Google across desktop and mobile, you end up using 2 keyword allotments, so you could end up reaching your keyword limit faster than you think.
The next thing you need to do is select locations and languages for each keyword. Again, if you select two countries or two languages, the keyword will count twice.
As we mentioned earlier, where Ranktracker really stands out is its localization features.
Aside from being able to pick from just about every country and official language in the world, you can drill even deeper at the city level:
So if you’re trying to rank a local auto body shop for a keyword like “car repair” this is the perfect feature.
Now, Ranktracker gives us the chance to add competitor domains the same way we added our domain.
When you get to see your dashboard (which will be pretty soon) you’ll be able to benchmark your stats against your competitors. Again, a fairly unique feature and something that you need to do if you want to form strategies to pass them in the rankings.
This is also a good time to ask yourself if you actually know who your competitors are.
Sometimes you might mistake real-life competitors for SEO competitors. You’ll be able to see pretty quickly if your perceived competition is ranking for the same keywords as you.
Once you click finish, you’ll need to wait a bit for Ranktracker to process the data.
After that, you can navigate to your dashboard.
It will give you information about changes in search position over time relative to your competitors. You can also check out information about your competitors and your pages.
When you first open your account, there won’t be much data to show, so you need to start with a strategy in mind and look forward. Come back later to see how your positions evolve.
After a few weeks of tracking your positions with Ranktracker, you’ll start to see which direction your content is headed. If you’re building quality backlinks and writing content around the topics you want to rank for, then you’ll hopefully start seeing results.
However, if you added a lot of keywords to track, then you’re bound to see dips in some, even if your positions are improving overall.
Don’t let those keywords fall by the wayside. Last month it was at 3, this month at 6, and maybe next month it will be off the first page.
You can use Ranktracker to identify where you’re slipping. Go to the Overview section of the project dashboard and click Filters, there you can expand the SERP features section.
Find all your keywords between positions 6 and 10 which have declined recently. If you have articles written on these keywords, they are great candidates for a Content Upgrade which means that you should strategically update the article to make it more relevant and thorough than your competition’s articles in the top 3.
As you continue tracking the article with Ranktracker, you’ll likely find that your rankings for that keyword will rise faster than new keywords. Upgrades are often a quick win that maximize the value of your SEO strategy.
We have our own way of updating content to help our clients rank faster at Cerebrum. If you want to copy our notes, check out the linked guide.
After using some of the features, there is a lot to love about this tool.
Here are some of the things we loved the most:
Granular SERP movement tracking
Most SERP trackers just focus on the movement. Not only does Ranktracker let you analyze movements at the daily level, but it also gives you tons of contextual data and the ability to filter for trends in movement, different locations, search engines, and much more.
Affordability
Ranktracker is quite budget-friendly and it offers a lot of value for what you pay. You can compare their prices to the market leaders yourself. There’s a huge difference.
Local SEO
The depth of data at the local level is pretty difficult to beat. And there’s also a huge focus on Google My Business. Add in the fact that it’s affordable and user-friendly, and you have the perfect tool for a local business owner.
Interesting features for marketers
Marketing departments and agencies will appreciate the Savings section of the dashboard. They can use it to illustrate how much money their SEO efforts are saving them vs. search ads.
Great for beginners
Everything about Ranktracker is easy to understand and use. The onboarding process is smooth with helpful tooltips guiding you through, and they even provide a custom SEO checklist for your website if you’re new to SEO.
You don’t get as many keywords as you think
As we noted earlier, there is one aspect of Ranktracker that can creep up on you if you’re not careful.
Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “cloud optimization tools”. You would probably want to see your rank on mobile and desktop, why wouldn’t you? That’s going to cost you 2 keyword slots.
Then, you’ll need to pick which search engines you want to rank for. Google is the obvious pick, but you’re curious about Bing. Now you’ve cost yourself another 2 slots, the total is at 4.
Ranking in the US is great, but you’ve noticed that half of your customers come from Europe. You decide to track your SERPs in the US, UK, France, and Germany to get a big-picture view of where you stand. You will need to analyze all 4 of the previously mentioned slots for those 4 countries, so now you’re taking up 16 keyword slots. All for 1 keyword.
If you do it that way, you’ll quickly run out of keyword slots. So the base plan is likely to be untenable for most businesses.
A note on perceived accuracy
We’ve seen a lot of criticisms about Ranktracker’s perceived accuracy. Frankly, we don’t have access to the real data on every website, so we can only speculate if that’s true.
Those who are complaining are likely noticing a disparity between Ranktracker and Google Search Console data. That’s normal. Every keyword tool suffers from the same issue.
Ranktracker is incredibly well-thought-out. There are even aspects that we didn’t cover. For instance, they provide extra paid AI writing functionality. Given our stance on AI, we didn’t have much time to cover it, but it might be convenient for you.
If you’re working on a budget and you need flexibility, Ranktracker works well. It also works if you want in-depth SERP tracking to be a part of your analysis. And finally, local SEOs will appreciate the ability to analyze GMB profiles and drill down at the city level.
There’s something in Ranktracker for everyone. Test it out for yourself.
