Top 7 SEO Keyword Research Tools
3. Web-Based SaaS Solutions
Web-based software as a service (SaaS) solutions do not run on your local computers. Instead, they run on a subscription-based server.
This eliminates the challenge of maintaining multiple IP addresses.
These solutions don’t run on your computer, so you don’t need to worry about leaving them running overnight.
This really is a better solution, which is why many of the desktop applications mentioned above also have web-based versions of their products.
Some of these web-based services focus primarily on ranking, while others have multiple capabilities.
Primarily rank tracking tools:
Authority Labs AWRCloud Stat
Multipurpose SEO tools that include rank tracking:
Dragon Metrics Linkdex
BrightEdge Searchmetrics Conductor seoClarity Moz
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Advantage
Disadvantage
Web-based solutions are more stable, require less maintenance, and manage IP rotation for you.
Many of the web-based tools have the capability to track local results within a city, as well as international results for different countries, which allows you to track ranking for your target market.
Web-based solutions tend to cost more than the desktop application rank trackers, and since they run on a server, most rank tracking is queued and scheduled, so you will not get immediate results.
It’s best to use these SaaS solutions when you are a large digital marketing agency or a large SEO company.
The other options may not be able to handle the large volume of keyword tracking that is needed when dealing with multiple clients.
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Tracking Number of Indexed Pages
Aside from tracking the ranking of keywords in search engines, you can also track the amount of pages indexed by search engines.
There are three ways to determine this in Google:
Using the Site: operator to view the number of results that appear for a specific domain.
Using Google Search Console’s (GSC) report on the number of indexed pages.
Using GSC’s status of indexed pages within your submitted XML sitemap.
All three will often give different results.
Usually the GSC indexed pages will give the largest number of pages, but may include duplicate content pages.
GSC’s status on the pages indexed within your XML sitemap is only helpful if your XML sitemap has a complete list of all the URLs on your site.
The site: operator will often have the fewest number of URLs because it removes pages with thin or duplicate content, low-quality pages, and spammy pages.
This information can be obtained from Google alone; however, there are many tools that will pull this information for you along with their rank tracking software.
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Tracking Local Maps Ranking
Pricing Is Determined by the Number of Keywords
In local SEO, you must optimize organic search results containing geographic information like a city, state or country.
You also must optimize the results in Google Maps and other online map websites where the ranking algorithm is different from the main organic search algorithm.
Since optimization here is targeted separately, it needs to be tracked separately using local map rank tracking tools.
One platform that does this is BrightLocal. It will track your businesses ranking within local maps results and you can set the location of where the search query runs.
Every search query uses server resources on web-based rank tracking tools.
It takes a longer time to run and increases the risk of getting blocked by search engines.
When running desktop applications, you can add in as many keywords you like, but to avoid getting blocked by search engines, you either decrease the speed of the request or you can keep the speed high but increase the number of IP addresses you will use to run the queries.
Running the request more slowly will cost more as it will take longer to complete.
Using a higher number of IP addresses also incurs additional costs.
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You can assign specific keywords to be tracked and priced accordingly.
If you don’t assign keywords, it will scrape various phrases from the pages of your site and check the ranking of those phrases at a low frequency, about once a month or longer.
Both GSC and SEMrush may not choose the keywords you really want to track, and they won’t give you the latest ranking numbers, but they can supply you with thousands to literally millions of keywords that your site ranks for.
2 Tools That Have No Price on the Number of Keywords
Google Search
Console SEMrush
The Google Search Console is free.
Google doesn’t charge by the keyword, but you aren’t allowed to specifically assign keywords to track.
It will just show you the top 1,000 keywords that have high rankings, impressions, and clicks.
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Select the Best Rank Tracking Tool for You
This wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of SEO rank tracking tools. These are just a few rank trackers that I (and many others in the SEO industry) consider essential.
I highly suggest you do your own research.
New keyword rank tracking tools are coming out all the time.
There will be rank tracking tools that only do rank tracking and there will be some that are more expensive that do a lot more – and possibly could replace some of your other SEO tools.
Some tools may have APIs where you can integrate the data with your custom- built tools.
Other tools may be focused only on the U.S. market, while others might be international or some other specific country where rank tracking should be done on other search engines (e.g., Baidu, Yandex, Naver, Seznam or others).
Consider all of this during your rank tracking tool selection process.
Find the rank tracking tool that best suits your specific needs.
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