The first 5 organic results on the Google search engine result pages receive almost 70% of all visits. And a quarter of people click the first result (Source).
Therefore, if your success depends on being found online versus the competition, you must have well-positioned keywords that are the most relevant to your sector.
To this purpose, monitoring the performance of your SEO strategy using keyword ranking software is crucial—it lets you identify areas for improvement.
Keyword ranking software offers vital information about how your page ranks on search results. Examine the most promising keywords as well as those your rivals are ranking for—in addition to providing you with data on the most searched-for terms.
We’ve reviewed the best-performing keyword ranking software for that ✨.
Table of Contents:
- Top Keyword Rank Tracking Software
- 1. 🗝️⭐ Surfer SEO 🌊
- 2. 🗝️ Moz Pro
- 3. 🗝️ Semrush
- 4. 🗝️ SpyFu
- 5. 🗝️ SE Ranking
- Guide
- FAQs
- Bottom Line
Top Keyword Rank Tracking Software
The world of keyword ranking is ultra-competitive. Search engine optimization’s (SEO’s) objective is to raise your position in search engines like Google. Strategically increase your site’s visitors.
We avoided free services for the most part, as the best tools available will charge—good news is, investing in yourself tends to pay off in the long run. Our research compared how each keyword ranking software performed in terms of performance, speed, adaptability, cost, reputation, user experience, and more.
Here are the top SEO tools on the market right now.
1. Surfer SEO 🚀 — Straightforward, Powerful Keyword Ranking Tool
Surfer SEO is a great on-page SEO tool that helps remove the element of uncertainty from the process.
In addition to being simple to use, implementing the software could really help you to boost overall SEO. You'll also more frequently rank higher for keywords!
Slawek Czajkowski unveiled Surfer in 2008. He had the goal of using smart data in each step of the SEO process. Slawek founded the agency—as it flourished, his company created a unique method for technical optimizations. As the tool grew in capabilities, its popularity grew.
With Surfer SEO, you can boost how Google-friendly your on-page content is. Surfer SEO analyses over ranking variables, comparing your work with those of your rivals, offering a highly data-driven SEO strategy to help you advance more quickly in the SERPs.
Unlike other tools that rely on simple keyword research, user statistics, and a basic set of instructions to accomplish the task less intelligently, Surfer uses data-driven modelling to help you rank your sites.
Unlocking the Power of Surfer SEO 🌞
You might think there would be too much information to process with a tool like this. However, Surfer SEO makes it simple to figure out how to rank on Google.
One of the best parts of using it was that it's like online surfing—just, with a lot more data. You’ll come upon some "keyword waves" that you are surfing.
In other words, this SEO tool is simple to use compared to some of its rivals (which might have a high learning curve). The layout is excellent, and the UI and UX are also excellent overall. Users of Surfer SEO now have access to six tools (up from four, with a few Surfer SEO extras that come at an additional premium)…
Unlock with Content Editing 🗝️
Keyword saturation is no longer sufficient. Surfer SEO employs artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to determine how prominent each phrase is for your rivals.
Gathered data provides you with precise and competitive instructions to meet the parameters set by Google. With the help of this content score, you constantly receive fast feedback.
The rating ranges from 0 (bad) to 100 (ideal). In doing so, Surfer SEO analyses your content and gives you a quick assessment of how well-written it is in relation to that of your rivals.
The quality of your material is less significant than its Google ranking potential. Even while grammar is a very essential ability, the content score extends beyond just assessing it.
Instead, it assesses how effectively your content contrasts with that of the most popular websites at the moment by looking at keywords in addition to headers, visuals, text length, and more than 100 other factors.
KW Research Planner ⭐
The keyword research tool that Surfer SEO offers is unique. It’s a lot like the other features in the application. A few related keyword ideas will show up once you input a seed term. Add the phrase you want to focus on after you've chosen it from the recommendations.
Although Surfer SEO's keyword analysis capabilities are a fantastic addition to the application, it's clear that the SERP and Content editing are where Surfer really shines.
Target keyword clusters to build subject authority by using the Surfer SEO Content Planner. This tool's categorisation of the kind of content makes it distinctive.
It can be difficult to rank for "shopping" keywords if generating content like product reviews. The top few results of Google are often taken up by major businesses like Amazon and eBay.
You can quickly examine keywords according to your search intent using the Surfer topic planner. And make supplementary material to tie to your money pages' position.
The types of search intent used by surfers include informative, shopping, and client research.
Try out Surfer SEO! 🏄🏽🌊
2. Moz Pro 📊—Best Keyword Ranking Software for New Businesses
Since its founding in 2004, Moz, formerly known as SEOmoz, has emerged as one of the leading SEO tools today.
The website's monthly membership service, Moz Pro, offers a variety of tools that can help you run a more successful SEO campaign and boost your digital marketing outcomes 💨. For businesses new to SEO, Moz's feature set does make things easier to grasp.
Additionally, regarding reputation and trust, Moz is presently a market leader in SEO—the adaptable toolbox serves as a fantastic all-in-one platform for enterprises of all sizes. As a result, prestigious businesses like Trivago, and Zillow utilise this service.
Why Moz Pro is So Highly Regarded… 🏢
With so many companies specialising in different aspects of SEO, Moz Pro offers a wide range of features for backlink profiling, keyword and competition analysis, and SEO crawls. It's actually one of the most complete services available to businesses engaged in SEO ranking.
On the contrary hand, compared to certain others, this breadth does lead to a higher learning curve. A more focused and reasonably priced service can be the best choice if you're new to SEO and particularly if you have relatively small-scale demands.
Moz Pro Costs
You’ll find 3 levels of membership for Moz, each offering distinct capabilities and monthly caps. For people who want to use Moz long-term, you can unlock pretty substantial savings by going for the annual subscription plan (about 20% off).
The starter plan has a low monthly starting price of around a tenner. However, it is intended for usage in a more constrained service region and for businesses with physical locations. It enables listing dissemination, social media publishing, listing administration, and local reputation management.
Meanwhile, the Pro plan starts at £80 monthly—that level is intended for sites that need to monitor SEO results more constantly. Analysis of keywords, technical SEO reviews, backlinks, and weekly ranking reporting are all available to pro subscribers. The Pro package offers a free trial version.
The Stat Search Analytics plan, which is the highest tier and somewhat more expensive at £580 monthly, is intended for businesses who require "High-capacity keyword tracking." It provides features for competitive research, integrates with Google Data Studio, records an infinite number of sites and rivals, and can monitor search engine rankings on a weekly and daily basis (mobile vs. computer).
3. Semrush—Trusted Keyword Ranking
Semrush Inc. is an American publicly traded business that provides the Semrush SaaS platform.
It’s frequently used by online businesses doing keyword research and gathering information on internet KW rankings.
The Pro tier gives you 50 socials, 500 tracked keywords, five projects, 100k crawls, and almost half a dozen reports. Overall, SEMrush ranks as a very affordable solution because SMBs can gain serious power if they use this tool correctly.
Semrush’s Keyword Ranking…
The Semrush interface is quite simple to use. The first thing you see is a screenshot of Domain Analytics, which provides a brief summary of the most popular keywords and traffic sources, including natural and sponsored visits.
The APIs/widgets for each aspect of your most current SEO job are located below that. So you’ll have custom-set areas to establish things like position tracking, scheduled page and backlink auditing, as well as reputation monitoring.
Semrush is one of the rare SEO tools that can also serve as a social listening platform—even while tools like Moz and Ahrefs interface with social media sources, monitor brands, and track mentions. The five primary sections on the left-hand side of the Semrush interface are Project, My Reports, Lead Gen, and Domain Analytics.
The SEMrush query bar can be adjusted for any statistic. For instance, you could select Keyword Overview from the drop-down menu to search for keywords and carry out searches on your most important terms.
Then, a number of tables, graphs, and dynamic data visualisations can be filled with information from the keyword overview. As an example, Semrush might provide a breakdown of organic vs paid search for the term "digital marketing" along with the average monthly search volume and a cost-per-click analysis of what a paid result would cost in various regions.
KWFinder and Semrush both offer the ability to limit search results by individual cities, while Semrush also offers the option to filter by country. The ability to choose between desktop and mobile search traffic is one distinctive filter that Semrush offers.
Overall ☄️
A strong all-in-one SEO platform. With the exception of keyword management, the firm offers just about everything a business needs to lead its SEO campaign and has removed the beta label from several of its most creative products.
4. SpyFu—Expert Keyword Ranking Software 🕶️
Due to its extensive offerings, potent reporting, and strong support for digital marketing and advertising, SpyFu is among the SEO industry’s most well-known brands.
While certain elements of this search engine optimisation product are a little tricky for complete novices, SpyFu is a fantastic overall solution.
It can meet the requirements of both experienced SEO users and everyday businesses. This delicate balance is made possible through the software’s superb UI design. Monthly prices start at £27 if you go for the annual plan level.
Because of that and its affordable pricing, it was an easy decision to position this in third place. SpyFu is a great option for small to medium-sized company customers in general.
Using the SpyFu Platform 🖥️
The SpyFu interface is cleverly organised—explore sections for analysing, PPC, keywords, backlinks, reporting, projects and more, along the top menu. (Though you’ll find a wide range of overall SEO tools, for the sake of this guide, we're mostly looking at its ability for keyword ranking.)
Keyword research is the real work that needs to occur for sites to prop up on SERPs. Although SpyFu has built-in keyword suggestion and managing capabilities, you can also start this process manually under the Keyword Research tab.
But once again, SpyFu does have built-in keyword management across the board. Find your needed section in the drop-down menus as well as Keyword Groups in the main research tabs. (Each tab populates a table with information such as monthly search volume, CPC, and difficulty rating.)
Those are three of the four central metrics (the last is Cost) used by SpyFu to carry out keyword research. The top keyword group suggestions from SpyFu are loaded on the left of the table, along with the keywords you've independently selected.
Verdict
Of all the SEO optimization tools we’ve come across, SpyFu may go the farthest in directly enhancing keyword rankings. SpyFu is able to provide SMBs with an intuitive tool that anticipates their demands. Its reasonable pricing—in comparison to other tools in this compilation—is a major perk.
SpyFu's concentration on keyword monetary worth and its in-depth search advertising breakdowns may be overkill for the typical SEO user who only wants to quickly locate and sort targeted keywords—good for the burgeoning number of companies attempting to incorporate their SEO research into a more comprehensive approach.
5. SE Ranking — Best Keyword Ranking Software for Tracking
While it’s not free software 🦾, SE Ranking is without a doubt one of the greatest keyword-tracking tools available.
So website auditing, test how strong your backlinks are, and even get a sneak peek at your competition's campaigns—in addition to evaluating the effectiveness of your keywords. For the lone sole trader to a fully-staffed enterprise, this great all-in-one SEO solution offers superior capabilities at adaptable costs.
Even for SEO rookies, SE Ranking makes things easy to start. You’re guided through the first 5 steps. The procedure first crunches through the most crucial data related to your site, finding what terms you will need to focus on, and then fine-tuning by preferred region and search engines.
Next, choose the half-dozen rivals you want to monitor and connect these to your profile and other systems like Google Analytics—giving you a comprehensive view of your traffic and it source. All of this can be put up in a short amount of time. Naturally, if you need more data later, you may adjust and experiment with your details.
What You Get
SE Ranking is a top-tier tool for evaluating SERP performance. This hub handles all elements of SEO. The ability of this portal greatly exceeds simply seeing your SEO rating.
Use SE Ranking to do things like tracking search traffic and how visible you are—get a sense of your ability to attract new leads, and also monitor the efforts of your competition, discovering ahead of time SEO problems.
There aren't many SEO-related jobs that this system can't carry out very well. For instance, to simple gain the total power and ability of SE Ranking alone, you'd need to dip constantly into at minimum two or three more tools, other than the best SEO providers.
Adding to the point above, SE Ranking provides great value for the money considering everything that it offers. This application may be used to handle all types of promotional services for multiple clients or to monitor one personal website. Its most affordable plan, which costs £15 monthly, offers surprisingly powerful abilities.
Understanding all of SE Ranking's capabilities does require something of a learning curve—which is to be expected. However, the platform opens up a huge resource library. All of the platform's powers are available in the resource centre. These guides and instructions are quite thorough and include screenshots for ease 🌴.
Best Keyword Ranking Software 📈 — Buying Guide
We’ve reviewed some of the most popular keyword ranking tools used by SEO experts and ordinary business people today. Now, let’s take a moment to understand this topic better…
Keyword Ranking Explained 📊
Want to sell your business, sell a product, or boost visibility?
Although it is a very complex topic, search engine optimization can be reduced to one key element. keyword positions.
Since higher ranks are required for more traffic, improving rankings is the main objective of any SEO effort for the majority of websites. But what does SEO's keyword ranking mean?
The primary keyword ranking definition relates to your position in search results for particular keywords. Businesses that are focused on utilising SEO to increase their traffic will pay attention to their keyword ranking for their most important keywords.
Pages often appear at a specified position on the search engine results page (or the SERP) for each given target phrase. Search engines evaluate and assess website components including content, meta-data, link building, usability, and more algorithms.
The ability to develop, set up, and optimise a website in order to improve its search engine ranks is what keyword ranking in SEO entails. After all, higher-quality sites will rank for more relevant keywords, whereas lower-quality sites will rank for less relevant keywords.
Sites with stronger keyword rankings will appear for more keywords, more popular keywords, on SERPS closer to page 1, and further up on page 1 as well! Because of this, acquiring traffic through Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines requires a thorough grasp of keyword positioning.
How Do Keyword Rankings Work? 💡
In SEO, "keyword rankings" relate to the precise position of your page in the SERPs for a given search term. Whatever position your URL appears in when users type search phrases that are related to the topic of your website is your search ranking.
Better keyword ranks indicate being near the top of the page (toward position #1), while lower keyword ranks mean going nearer to the bottom of the page (toward spot #10). Search results typically display roughly 10 listings per page. This concept of keyword ranking also relates to the page in the SERP on which a URL is shown, with more relevant results showing on page 1 and less relevant results on page 2 or above.
It is not possible to explicitly tell search engines such as Google what keywords you would like a page to rank for; instead, they evaluate the website's content and make their own judgments. Additionally, there is no restriction on how many keyword-ranks a page may have.
Keywords are "key terms used in the written content of the web page," according to Google. This implies that the concept of a keyword rank is for key phrases and terms that are present on the website as discovered by Google. This concept illustrates the relationship between the keywords used on a website for SEO and the terms entered by online users.
How to Track Your Keyword Ranking ⭐
There are a few techniques to find out which keywords are most relevant to your site.
In addition to giving companies and websites a means to observe how people arrive at their websites via searches, Google provides Search Console as a tool to assist owners in keeping track of the quality of their sites in the indexes.
It provides marketers with a tool to discover new keywords that are optimal for their website and evaluate traffic from Google searches. It also allows them to know which queries people are using to get their site. They are all crucial for SEO.
All websites may see a "Performance" analysis from Search Console that allows them to examine online traffic for the webpages on their site divided by URLs and figures. Marketers may examine the keyword rankings for their most popular URLs along with statistics on views, impressions, click-through rates, and average position.
What Google Console Lets You See 🔍
So what does Search Console's keyword rank actually mean? Let's examine a few of the metrics that were utilised to create this report.
You’ll be able to see the following in the Coverage report:
- Impressions: Or the number of links to your website that a person sees in the Google search results (even if the result was not scrolled into view). This is an excellent approach to grasp the worth of keywords and how they may make your site seem to more people, even though it's not a good way to track or monitor keyword ranking positions.
- Clicks: This measure shows the number of Google search clicks that lead to visitors coming to your website.
- CTR: Known as "click-through-rate," is the ratio of the number of clicks a website receives to the number of impressions it receives.
- Average Position: This refers to the top result from your website's average position for a specific keyword. The position varies frequently, give or take a few spaces, therefore average is presented here.
Understanding this information is necessary for knowing your site's search ranks and for enhancing search performance. Knowing your keyword ranking in SEO can assist businesses in doing keyword analysis and curating their website's content to better perform for high-value keywords that increase site traffic and income.
FAQs 📚 Best Keyword Ranking Software
What SEO Tool is the Overall Best?
Ahrefs won the top SEO tool overall by Forbes Advisor. Your specific demands will determine which tool is ideal for you. For instance, Surfer SEO is a very intuitive, cost-effective SEO tool for users who want to start working with keywords instantly.
Do SEO Tools Merit the Cost?
Absolutely. If the amount of high-quality visitors you send to your website determines how successful your business is, you need something powerful to compete in that landscape. Without implementing SEO tools for keyword research, monitoring backlinks, analysing rivals, and auditing your optimizations, it is essentially impossible to systematically increase your Google ranks.
Does SEO Outperform Google Ads?
In the long term, SEO is preferable to Google Ads since it allows for more visibility without the expensive advertising costs. You can rapidly boost the exposure of the website data thanks to Google Ads, but you'll have to pay for that visibility in the form of advertising expenses.
How Can I Improve my Site’s Search Ranking?
The best way to improve your website’s search ranking is to make it more authoritative. This occurs by providing credible, competitive content that web searchers are looking for and find useful and that other sites do too―to the point that these entities want to backlink, or link from their site to yours due to how good the information you provide is. Your search rankings will increase as more high-authority sites backlink to your pages, giving your site a more authoritative presence in SERPs.
Are SEO Tools Safe?
The top SEO software packages offer many degrees of protection, like most. You should consider security features like documentation that demonstrates regular security patches and upgrades penetration testing, 2FA or MFA, encryption techniques, personal online privacy 🌴, and the ability to track user activity when selecting this kind of software.
Do Small Businesses Benefit from SEO?
They can. In particular, if the success of your company depends on clients discovering you online, SEO is almost unquestionably beneficial for small enterprises. One of the most affordable methods to get more exposure to potential clients who are already looking for the services or goods your SMB offers online is to optimise your website for search engines.
Bottom Line
When purchasing a new technology, price is an important consideration. Pricing for keyword ranking and monitoring software typically relies on how the suppliers accept payments. Typical pricing schemes include:
- Free: There are keyword management tools that are free to use. However, they are just really simple and have only the most fundamental characteristics. These are also frequently provided by companies to entice you to purchase their more expensive plans.
- Monthly: The most popular sort of subscription plan in the market is definitely the monthly plan. Due to the low cost of using premium services, this is most advantageous to freelancers and small enterprises. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied, they’re able to quickly unsubscribe.
- Annual.:Monthly payments are avoided with yearly plans. Furthermore, these are frequently cheaper and more cost-effective than monthly subscriptions. However, since the annual charge is only paid once, this is suitable for companies with sufficient funds. With this payment option, it is also more challenging to cancel after committing to a certain solution.
Overall: It might be difficult to choose the best keyword ranking and monitoring platform because there are so many incredible options available, many of them include complicated tools and capabilities. Nevertheless, it is wise to consider the bottom line at all times.
