Once you start your site and publish some content, you’ll be interested in finding out where your site is ranking for keywords that you’re targeting. (I hope they’re Keyword Golden Ratio terms.)
I used to look up my site rankings by hand! That took forever, and you can really only check your rankings by hand for a few terms.
Currently, my primary tool for SERP (Search Engine Result Page) tracking is called Serprobot (formerly serplab.co.uk). I’m not an affiliate — it’s just a good tool.
The best part is they have a free trial for 14 days. Then after that, it’s the cheapest option that I’ve seen. They’ve adjusted the pricing over time, but as I’m writing this it’s $5 per month to track 300 keywords per day.
You can track keywords on different sites and set up projects.
The best part is that you can send an automated email at whatever interval you want. So then you don’t have to log into the site to check your rankings.
If you want to improve your rankings, then you should check out my approach to outreach and guest posting.
Want to outsource your guest posting?? Check out my new service.
Other Options for Keyword Tracking
The Google Search Console gives you some information about what keywords your site is ranking for, but it’s not exactly what you’re looking for most of the time. The Search Console really gives you info about where your site has shown up in the SERPS, not necessarily the actual ranking. Read the Search Console documentation here – it’s thorough but dry.
For example, you might publish a new post and Google might test to see where it should rank for some keywords. A post may show up #2 for a few people searching on Google, but no one clicked on it. So after that test, Google may drop the ranking down to #11. That’s just a purely hypothetical example.
SEMRush (affiliate link) and Ahrefs also give you some rank tracking abilities. I’m unsure of the refresh rate of the rankings for those tools. Typically, I find that SEMRush and Ahrefs seem to be a bit behind in tracking keywords compared to Serprobot or any other dedicated keyword tracking tool. SEMRush and Ahrefs excel with additional functionality.