Marketing is not about wasting the money, stop wasting money!

Marketing is all about achieving the objectives of promoting and selling the product or service at the minimal expenses or no expenses at all and it is the process of keeping the process simple, avoiding the unnecessary expenses, and achieve the goals makes it real marketing.

In this article, I am going to help you discover that one ultimate and accurate free SERP tracker tool that most of the digital marketers don’t use for several reasons.

Somehow I still believe the following could be some of the reasons why they don’t use free keyword ranking checker tool.

1. Lack of basics
2. Lack of data analysis skills
3. Poor understanding of data
4. Not knowing how to read data available on Google tools (Google search console, Google analytics etc)
5. Not knowing/understanding the importance of having Google search console account
6. May not have rights or access to the tools or data.
7. Misbeliefs around data, as they always leave in the illusion of those third party tool companies impression.

And a couple of other things have literally given an opportunity to multiple third-party companies who can produce tons of unreliable and unrealistic data, and that’s how tons of SEO or SERP tools have come into the market and making lots of money serving no actual purpose.

Why SERP/Keyword Rank Checker Tools?

Checking keyword positions of a website on search engines like Google, Bing and other search engines has become a most important task for SEO professionals with the increasing competition and competitors taking over their website position on search results page or search engine ranking position (SERP), with this increasing demand the searches on the internet for the keyword ranking checker tools is also increasing.

For many agencies in order to understand the SEO performance of the website, it has become really important to understand the progress of the keywords, as that’s one of the best ways to understand the organic performance of the website.

Many webmaster, SEO professionals, and digital marketers have that one question bothering them,

• For which keywords my website rank on Google?
• How do I track my keyword SERP?
• Which are the best tools for accurate keyword position tracking?
• Cheap or free tools to track the keyword position?
• How to check keyword rankings for multiple keywords?
• Bulk keyword rank checker tools for free?

If you are the one looking for keyword rank checker tools make sure that you read this article thoroughly in order to avoid those additional marketing expenses on third party tools to track your website keyword positions.

The most accurate keyword rank checker is available for free, but then most of them don’t use it or they don’t know how to make use of it.

The core purpose of using SERP tools is to track the accurate position of the keyword for the specific location and specific device for that specific moment/time, and unfortunately, no third party tool you rely on produces this data correctly.

My question is,

Should you be still spending a few hundreds of $ every month to get the unreliable data?

Before you adopt any tool don’t forget to ask these 6 questions?

• How does your keyword ranking tool work?
  • The keyword ranking checker tools will have a simple script or program built to scrape the search engine ranking results and anybody can do this by themselves on their computers, they don’t have to actually spend few hundreds of $ for something that’s available on the internet, which you can get for free.
  • There are a couple of things taken into the picture before they scrape the content such as IP addresses from which the script is run/executed in order to scrape the Google search results.

• How many IP’s do those tools use to get the rankings/results?
  • As per the first step, the script or program will be executed from a single computer using multiple random IP’s which may be specific to a region or may not be and hence the results won’t be accurate.

• The average position in which location? And how are you serving it exactly?
  • Many SERP rank checker tools fool you by mentioning that they provide keyword ranking for cities as well, which is a wrong data as you cannot get that data through tools as any tool that you use to find the ranking through an IP may or may not belong to your city, or when they are producing ranking results at country level their one specific location IP doesn’t work, as the keyword rankings are always considering the user-specific IP, their Google TLD, their browsing history, their browser setting and couple of them. The Keyword rank checker tools in the market cannot have all of it, as they just take an IP into consideration and scrape the results.

• Average position of which device?
  • Most of the SERP tools doesn’t define the device average position, they just tell you it’s a ranking on Google.

In this article I will be explaining about tracking keyword rankings on a regular basis, and this one keyword track tool I speak about is the most accurate one and no other tool can match its results.

Wondering which is that tool?

It’s the one which you already know, must have used or may be wondering on how to read data on the tool.

Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console)

Google search console is one of the best tools which helps you in understanding all of your keywords and their average positions, but you may have to follow few steps in order to enable the ranking report for your few thousands of keywords.

Google search console search performance report on Google webmaster tools provides only sampling data and you will be able to track keywords and their rankings for not more than around 1500 keywords, but most of the websites with lots of content and optimized for search engines rank for few thousands of keywords and how do one track positions of these keywords on search engines for free?

Follow these quick steps,

So that you will be able to track the complete keywords that your website ranks, it be 20,000 or 50,000 you can track rankings of all those keywords on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, quarterly, the way you prefer to.

Step 1: Make sure that your website has an analytics account and you have access to it if you don’t have an analytics account create it.

Step 2: Make sure you have webmaster tools account to your website and you have access to it, if not create webmaster tools account for your website.

Your search console or search analytics section by default serves sample keyword and their ranking data.

Step 3: Go to your analytics account, Navigate to Acquisition section in the left side navigation and right below the section “Google Ads” and above the section “social” you can find search console, as shown in the below image, and when you try to access any of the data under it you find a message as “This report requires search console integration to be enabled”

Step 4: Click on set up search console data sharing and that will take you to a new interface where you have to allow search console to pass data to the analytics.

Step 5: On the new window/screen that pops up after the previous stage you just have to click on done, so that you will be connecting the search console and analytics and from there on you will be able to access your complete keyword data.

How Accurate is search console keyword rankings data?

I will help you out in understanding the data and its accuracy, but meanwhile, you may have to realize the following:

1. Search console provides rankings of all the keywords that your website is eligible for at least 1 impressions
2. You will be seeing rankings of queries for whichever your website is ranking only and not all the keywords that want to track, the list you have and the keywords for which website is already raking may match completely or may match partially, which is again based on the keywords you have picked to check the rankings and the keywords for which your website is already performing
3. If you couldn’t find the keywords on search console your website is not ranking for those keywords and you can straight away mark them as not ranking. The third party tools may ask you to define the rankings count ( Below 5th page or track only 50 positions), but search console, in this case, provides your data for your keyword even when it’s on the 20th search results page or above that.
4. You will be also able to understand the impressions, CTR and clicks the keyword has achieved.

You can download all of these data and process it for better insights,

1. You can do a position Vs CTR study
2. The comparison study of keywords rankings ( You will get the recent 16 months data)
3. You can do a study on understanding the low competitive keywords
4. You can add a secondary dimension to your keyword data such as city/country and study keyword performance by region.
5. Understand the opportunities and more

Search console data is 100% accurate as it’s the direct access to the happenings on search engines, search engines and the real user data of the keyword against the website will be measured.

Third party tools are only the machine, script or bot extracting search results from some random ID, Device, and location.

Search console is exact information of users interacting with our search results from their respective location, device, IP and browser.

Pick what information needs to be shown as a trend against the keywords shown in the report

Keyword Rank tracking for 27768 keywords, which can be download.

Various kinds of information around the keywords, such as the impressions, CTR, Clicks, Average position of the keyword. The same as a comparison report as well.

Adding a secondary dimension country for the keywords, so that can track the rankings for every single keyword by country.

After adding the country track,

Note: Analytics free version doesn’t provide data beyond one lakh rows if you need all data try removing the comparison retaining the secondary dimension filter.

Conclusion:

The new search console update has opened the new windows, where it helps you to track the past 16 months data as compared to only the recent three months data. If you wish to track data month on month for several years you are suggested to download, format and save it or upload to your database, so that you can pull out the data whenever it’s needed to you.

My advice to all SEO professionals, stop using the third part SERP checker tools, they just bluff you (Fool you) with some random data, non reliable data, many of the tools also ask you to link your search console or analytics and they steal your data and present back to you in the form of reports, the ugliest part is that since they have access to your data there’s a possibility of they selling your data to your competitors.

The keyword rankings tools or keyword position tracking tools that you find in the market are very simple scrapers of the Google search results from one specific device and address, and the same simple thing can be done on your computer also by running some simple scripts using the open source code, we, in fact, do this to study a couple of other things or when we just want to find the relevant domains based on the keywords.

If these companies have to build the accurate data as search console provides most of them go bankrupt or they make us go bankrupt by charging a bomb.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Consultant