SEO Powersuite’s Rank Tracker not only tracks rankings but it also tracks all of the hows and whys of the ranking along with reports.
Rank Tracker
Step 1: You enter the URL of the website that you want to track.
Step 2: You connect Rank Tracker with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
The first thing it has you do in the tutorial is to create an account with Rank Tracker. The first thing I noticed is that it asks you to set up the website and connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console. DIIB is the only SaaS (software as a service) that I came across so far that does this. I like the fact they are doing this because it brings all of the info into one place without having to log into multiple places to get the full story and lets you compare the stats to bring you ideas.
DIIB, however, has the upper hand on this because you can also hook up Google My Business in addition to Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Step 3: You enter in the keyword phrases you want it to track. The software supplies you with keyword phrases already that it found in Google Analytics and Google Search Console. I had already done keyword research for this company so let’s see how it compares.
If you ever want to check the rankings of some keyword phrases and don’t want to use up the resources of your online paid SaaS then I would recommend using Small SEO Tools. With the smaller packages of SaaS that only allow you a certain amount of searches forcing you to upgrade to use the more of the tool this is a lifesaver! You can enter ten keyword phrases at a time here. I searched for about 180 keyword phrases before the image captcha kicked in. A few hundred more searches were done from me and the captcha never came back.
A quick little side test. How accurate is the search volume for Small SEO Tools when compared to Moz which I have researched and found to be very accurate?
Here are the results below:
| Keyword | Moz Min Volume | Moz Max Volume | Small SEO Tools Volume |
| knives | 70801 | 118000 | 0 |
| benchmade knives | 30301 | 70800 | 33100 |
| case knives | 30301 | 70800 | 40500 |
| throwing knives | 11501 | 30300 | 40500 |
| knifeworks | 9301 | 11500 | 8100 |
| chef knives | 6501 | 9300 | 33100 |
| custom knives | 6501 | 9300 | 12100 |
| steak knives | 6501 | 9300 | 12100 |
| ceramic knives | 4301 | 6500 | 8100 |
| cobratec knives | 4301 | 6500 | 2400 |
As you can see ‘knives’ is searched for zero times! I have seen this on some other online tools as well. They must use the same API when generating numbers. One thing for sure is Google AdWords Planner search volume is REALLY off! The numbers are close but not really close, so take their search volume numbers with a grain of salt.
Now what I would really like to see is something that checks the rankings over time along with the estimated number of searches over time. When I have a client for over one year I re-run the numbers to make sure each keyword phrase is still searched for often enough. I have discovered that trends can make some of the keyword phrase searches change. Not many times but enough to take notice.
So, I combined the keyword research I have done along with the keyword phrases discovered by SEO Powersuite (really from Google Analytics and Google Search Console) and got rid of the keyword phrases that I do not want to try and rank for and that is not relevant. For example, ‘knife up’ is an outdoor magazine and ‘knives out’ is a movie would not fetch a high conversion rate.
Step 4: For step 4 you get to choose the search engines to add both mobile and non-mobile versions.
Finished Dashboard: The finished dashboard below shows some nice options.
You get to see the rankings over time (everything from 1 week to 3 years), what you rank in each search engine, SERP (search engine results pages) Analysis, Visibility, Organic Traffic, and Keyword Difficulty.
Once these stats populate after some time I will come back and review how accurate and useful these items are.
It appears that the SEO Powersuite Rank Tracker does more than track rankings…
Under the column Target Keywords, we also have # of searches, visibility, and what page you rank on, SERP Analysis, Organic Traffic, SERP Features, and Keyword Difficulty.
Keyword Research found Within Rank Tracker
Under the column Keyword Research, we have the ability to see what keyword phrases are ranked for a specific website. Which includes all of the data for the keywords they rank for.
They have something called Keyword Gap where it lets you know which keyword phrases they rank on that you don’t and what keyword phrases you share in rankings.
Google Search Console data is displayed as well which shows the keywords, number of clicks to the website, impressions, click-through-rate (CTR), average rank, top page, and keyword difficulty.
Under Keyword Planner, you can get more keyword phrase ideas. I use this as one of my sources for finding keyword phrases in my keyword research so it is nice to see it here. It also gives you all of the data that is associated with Google AdWords.
Another nice surprise is Google Autocomplete. This is another source I use when I do my keyword research manually where I get keyword phrase ideas from. With this tool, I don’t have to manually search, copy, and paste what I find into my spreadsheet.
Another nice surprise is that this tool looks up ‘related searches’ in the search engines which is another thing that I do manually. This would save me a lot of time from searching, copying, and pasting the data into my spreadsheet. This also gives you all of the data that goes with it.
No way! This tool also gives you related questions as well! I usually go to a free site like Answer the Public to find questions related to my keyword research. By answering questions related to your topic on your website you increase the odds of building website authority, traffic, and additional rankings. All of the stats for these questions such as visit, difficulty, etc. are included.
TF-IDF Explorer? Never heard of this one but it returns the most meaningful and frequently used keywords that your top-ranking competition uses. It grabs this data from Google AdWords I found out.
There is also a tool called Keyword Combinations that create new keyword ideas for you that brings up lists of mixed keywords, combined keywords, and misspellings. This may come up with some new ideas but I do not see it being very effective.
They have a column labeled ‘Keyword Sandbox’ that examines your website and gives you data. It was unclear at first of what it does but this is what their website says about it.
Keyword research takes time, and in most cases you aren’t done with it at one go. So you obviously need a place to conveniently store all your keyword ideas for future and be able to analyze and re-analyze them over and over again.
Well, this is exactly what the new Keyword Sandbox module in Rank Tracker is for!
Essentially this is a place to store all of the keyword phrases that you are researching and gives you the data on how your website does with these keyword phrases. I have created a custom spreadsheet that does this already but it doesn’t auto-populate like this one. I’ll toy around with this one but it looks like it could save me a lot of time.
Competitor Research in Rank Tracker
Well, I’m not sure if they are trying to overload me or try their hardest to please me. I had this very same software on a windows computer years and years ago. It looks like they keep advancing and improving their software which is really nice to see because when I had this software before it didn’t have a tenth of what it has now.
Basically, this gives you the data shared and unshared with competitors it finds for you to research. when you click on an item in the above table it redirects you to the keyword research part of the software to give you more details. It gives you the option of domain competitors, Topic Competitors, and Top Pages.
Domain Strength Research
Under this section, the software goes over the current status of your website that includes its own grade of your domain, traffic, backlinks, no-follow or follows, how many pages are indexed, social media popularity, and more. This is also viewable on the LinkAssistant.
Generated Reports
The reports that can be generated below also can be set up to compare to previous time periods. These reports can be shared with other members of the team and your customers.
These reports include:
- Keyword Rankings and Visibility
- Competition Rankings
- Keyword Rankings grouped by SE
- Keyword Rankings grouped by Keyword Groups
- Ranking History
- Keyword Research
- Organic Website Traffic
- Domain Strength
This is a nice addition that not all services have. I do not believe Mangools has this but Moz does. Moz allows you to custom create the reports to send out while SEO Powersuite you cannot custom create the reports but send them out as they are.
I can customize the report by picking and choosing what to display in the report so that I can customize it to each individual customer that only wants these details or those details.
Conclusion of Rank Tracker
While looking over the software, which I used to own before years and years ago, it was nice to see that they made a ton of improvements.
Although I would not trust the number of searches of the keyword phrases as to being accurate the tools offered in just this one part of the software will save me a lot of time. In my opinion, the numbers it comes up with for how often it is searched for is way lower than what it really is. It is nice to see that they incorporate clicks, impressions, and traffic from Google Search Console which is very accurate to use though.
The difficulty of ranking for each of the keyword phrases I was not impressed with at first (high and n/a popped up) because it pulled its data from Google AdWords so I was about to write it off as being inaccurate but in another area of the software I had actual numbers that the software used and compared it to a trusted source that I deemed accurate.
If you look below you can see how close these numbers match.
| Moz Difficulty |
SEO Powersuite Difficulty |
| 20 | 15.8 |
| 23 | 18.7 |
| 28 | 18.8 |
| 15 | 19.5 |
| ? | 19.6 |
| 25 | 19.9 |
| 20 | 20.5 |
| 20 | 20.6 |
| 17 | 20.8 |
| ? | 21.2 |
| 25 | 22.2 |
| 33 | 25.7 |
| 26 | 25.7 |
| 29 | 25.8 |
| 30 | 27.4 |
| 32 | 27.4 |
| 27 | 28.8 |
| 26 | 29.2 |
| 32 | 29.5 |
| 33 | 33.1 |
| 37 | 35.6 |
| 43 | 35.9 |
| 37 | 39 |
The excellent job of tracking your rankings over time is worth the money alone. Moz is starting its own rank tracker that is still in its infancy but will get better over time.
I was blown away at the resources for the keyword research tools. It was like the software knew exactly where I pulled my research from manually and provided it for me in one location that also auto-populated the stats for me instead of having me do it myself.
The competition resource section covers all of the basics but is lacking in some areas such as listing the specific backlinks that point to the website that Moz Open Site Explorer provides. When I checked out the LinkAssistant portion of this SaaS, unfortunately, it was not there either.
The domain strength portion of this software exceeds other SaaS that I used in the past and I will compare it to other SaaS that I will review later. One thing that I really liked is that it shows you how many pages are indexed by each search engine. With the URL I tested I found out that Google only has a small percentage of pages indexed when compared to the other search engines which tell me a major area to work on that will help tremendously that I missed before.
In the reports section of this software, it is laid out nice but I wish that you could create custom reports and add sections manually that you want to be done. With the number of searches per month for each keyword phrase, I would not want to send out that particular report.
For just this one section of the software, I would rate this a solid 9 out of 10.
Don’t forget to see my review on the SEO Powersuite LinkAssistant.
Don’t forget to see my other reviews on SEO Powersuite:
- SEO Powersuite
- SEO Powersuite Website Auditor
- SEO Powersuite Spyglass
- SEO Powersuite Rank Tracker
- SEO Powersuite LinkAssistant
Interested? Follow the links below.
SEO PowerSuite is available in Free, Professional and Enterprise versions. Six months of search algorithm updates are included in the Professional and Enterprise versions. After the six months expire, search algorithm updates are provided on a paid basis. Depending on the license type and the number of months you pay in advance, the fee can run as low as $8.89/mo.
The maintenance price will probably increase depending upon how much you use it as well, but the total price from what I can find online looks like it is still cheaper than the monthly SaaS (software as a service) out there.
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