Dr. Strangerank or: How I learned to stop worrying and love SERP trackers
Here is a tale from one of our users named Ian, an SEO expert currently working for a large e-commerce company. When I asked him to write about how he started using SERP trackers, he shared some valuable insights, and I’m sure some of you will relate:
Let me tell you a little story about how some beliefs can restrict your SEO game. Having been in SEO essentially since the dawn of the field (when it was ridiculously easy to rank websites organically), I developed some ego-boosting beliefs about the greatness of my own methods and techniques. Because of that, I sometimes found myself not very willing to adapt to various new products, just because I got accustomed to behavioral patterns of checking things myself and knowing I could “get the job done.” It was somewhat impractical, though, considering SEO is a field that requires constant adaptation and self-critique.
As time went by, my unwillingness to adapt to new technologies started to take its toll on my business in the form of money, wasted time, and trouble with my customers. I found myself overwhelmed with the amount of work I sometimes needed to do just to keep up with my job requirements. Eventually, however, I surrendered myself to the process of automation and embraced progress into my heart, so to speak. One of the great leaps in convenience and leveling up my game was thanks to the discovery of SERP trackers. SERP trackers are tools that allow you to see how your keywords rank organically across Google and other search engines that you promote in, all in one useful location, just like a trusty stock trading platform allows you to monitor all your stocks in one place. More importantly, a SERP tracker can show you all the ups and downs that your ranks undergo, and it can keep historical data of those changes. This allows you to see the bigger picture of how SEO works and lets you tweak your strategy accordingly. Instead of keeping track of 300 keyword ranks (which is a conservative estimate) by myself, a SERP tracker gathers all that data on a single page and spreads the data out for me to analyze and organize.
Enjoy the flow.
Often, I found myself compromising and neglecting to track all my keywords because of the sheer volume, and I ended up focusing on just a partial picture. Having all that data laid out with easy-to-read tables in front of me has made a world of difference to me. Let me tell you, the difference between using a SERP tracker and doing it by yourself is staggering; it’s like the leap from doing mental math to using a computer, or from horses to Tesla automated cars.
Next up was the need to keep my clients up to date with how their campaigns were going. In the infancy of SEO, when it was all very new, using Word, a few Excel tables and a check up on Google was enough, but here too I needed to evolve. This evolution came in the form of daily automated SEO ranking reports sent from a SERP tracker. It was a world of difference and a major time saver. Not to mention that customers love to be up to date and have their data fresh in an easy-to-read format.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the reason I was hesitant at first was because the first generation SERP trackers simply weren’t all that great. Inaccuracy, cumbersome data presentation, and slow speeds plagued those tools, and it took time and evolution to get to their current level of smoothness and innovation. Also, as time passed, Google evolved and became ridiculously personalized – the rank a person searching Google saw was influenced by factors such as Google’s geo-targeting capabilities, cookies, the platform (mobile or desktop), your search history, your Google profile, and others. Because of that, the old-fashioned manual checking started to return wrong readings of ranks. The era of single universal ranks was over, and even using the browser’s incognito mode or a proxy server to get a correct rank became pretty much useless a few years back. “Manual checking” simply doesn’t work anymore, and it hasn’t for many years now. SERP trackers, however — the good ones — do the incredible in this regard, and that is provide you with unbiased ranks that are clean of any personalization checks you or your proxy servers are subjected to. You only need to build your tracking portfolio correctly, and you’re set.
Scientists say the SERP tracker gene is one of the genes that helped SEO evolve to what it is today
So there you have it, yet another good case for the use of SERP trackers as a whole. ProRankTracker, in case you are new to this, is currently the most highly affordable SERP tracker on the market with the lowest PPK (price-per-keyword). And unlike some tools out there, it’s 100% accurate, doesn’t load you with unnecessary features, and most important of all — it will help you get the job done. Go ahead, give it a try!
