17 awesome SERP tracker features that will evolve your SEO to the next level
The features that you will read about here are almost guaranteed to make you more efficient at your work, boost your SEO and even give you an edge over your competitors. Some of these are basic must-haves in today’s search engine environment for every expert, and some will give you some additional unique skills. As usual, I will be referencing PRT’s features, and it will be up to you to cross check with other SERP trackers in the market and discover what works best for you.
White label automated ranking reports – This is one of the best features SERP trackers offer. Sending periodic ranking reports to clients is necessary to keep them updated on how their campaign is going and that their money is well spent. A SERP tracker must be able to produce crisp-looking, easy-to-understand reports, or else your job as an SEO expert will be taken over by manually producing reports for your clients, convincing clients to rely just on your word, or time wasted on often-faulty manual cross checks. Next comes the issue of branding those reports so that your clients don’t see “XYZ SERP tracker” on the title of their reports, just YOUR beautiful logo and company details. I’m sure you are very proud of your logo and took time and careful planning to develop it, so you need to showcase that!
- With PRT you can send a virtually unlimited amount of white label ranking reports to your clients. That’s right – unlimited. Because you never know how many you might need for a specific client, and you don’t want some counter ticking away.
- All of PRT’s reports are 100% white label.
- You can customize the templates of the reports the way you like and add that personal touch by changing the logo, text, or colors of your reports.
- Reports and notifications can be sent to your clients using your custom email address as the sender.
- Choose from more than 11 types of different reports using historical data that can showcase your ranks and progress.
- All the reports are exportable via PDF, CSV, XSLX files and can be either sent to email, downloaded or uploaded to your Dropbox or Google Drive.
- Create stunning case studies with reports to awe your potential future clients
- Read more about the importance of branding your reports HERE
Shared reports – Moving up to the next level of white label ranking reports, this one is of the best features for impressing your clients. In addition to the orthodox approach SERP trackers go by – that is, sending PDF reports by email – PRT has an option to host a page branded with your logo and company details that looks like it’s hosted under your URL. The page gets updated daily with your clients’ ranks and can be encrypted with a password and an expiration date. Some SEO experts told me most of their clients actually prefer this over PDF reports by email.
MyRanks – If you thought shared reports sounded cool, this one is a real show stopper – MyRanks is an iOs and Android mobile app for your clients that shows them their ranks (you customize what they can see), branded with your details and logo. Many other SERP trackers only offer the usual PDF reports by email option, limiting their clients to just that one option. You won’t believe the world of difference it makes for a client giving him the option to view his ranks through the convenience of their mobile phone whenever they want, instead of waiting for that PDF report to come by email. It will make you look highly professional and confident, and just showcasing it to future clients during a sales pitch can impress them and improve your chances of closing a deal.
Get more info about MyRanks – An app for your clients
Sub accounts – Only the top SERP trackers in the market offer this feature. Sub accounts are another high-level white label feature. An excellent way to impress big clients. The entire PRT system can essentially be branded with YOUR logo instead of PRT (keeping us backstage) and appear like it is hosted on your website, and you decide what permissions each sub account gets. You can give a sub account to a colleague or a customer (it can really impress an important client getting his own SERP tracker access). The choice is all yours.
Actual keyword search volume – Ever since Google changed its Keyword Planner to only show real search volume data for top-paying customers and give the rest of us useless ranges, many who have been dependent on this data have taken a nasty hit and started desperately sleuthing for ways to bypass that. Needless to say, PRT has been one of the few in the market that managed to bypass that issue in less than three weeks and gave their users their sweet keyword search volume back! Nothing special needs to be activated to see full search volume; all paid plans simply have their search volume displayed as if no Google update ever took place.
SERP tracking mobile app – Some SERP trackers on the market are still only desktop based, which requires their users to be in front of their computer to access the system. This is very peculiar, considering virtually everyone has mobile phones, and mobile access has been a very basic need for more than a few years now. Everything in PRT is accessible through our mobile phone app. It’s a basic convenience, since I’m sure you are not always in your office and want the ability to check your ranks on the go, as you please, without being dependent on your computer.
Keyword discovery – This one is all about gathering intel and information about keywords, websites and niches. This tool can give you a real edge over your competitors if used correctly. So what this unique and amazing tool can do is reverse-engineer search, in a sense, and discover hidden keywords that rank top100 for your websites in all major search engines—keywords you might not have even been aware of!
The appearance of hidden keywords is one of the lesser known ‘side affects’ of SEO. When you promote websites for a bunch of “main keywords,” other related keywords are bound to sneak into top 100 positions and just stagnate because you are not aware of them. With Ranking Discovery, you can see those keywords, and because these keywords already rank within the top100 positions, you can promote them to higher positions with relative ease and drive traffic and paying customers to your websites.
The real beauty of this tool is that it can work for almost any website, and that presents some great opportunities for gathering data on websites and niches.
There are a few strategies that can really boost traffic if you know about hidden keywords. Here are three neat strategies you can use in your SEO with Ranking Discovery that will give you that useful advantage:
- Google is hiding ranks from you—time to get them back! – The ABCs on how to discover hidden keywords and promote them, as well as the basics behind the whole process
- 3 steps to level up your sales pitch to new clients using secret SEO intel – How to use the tool to give your clients value that can increase your closing rates
- The Ranking-Spy SEO Method – How to research a niche more effectively and discover all the quality keywords niche leaders are targeting.
- Reverse engineering search engines – More about the process.
Keyword suggestion tool – As the name implies, this tool can suggest relevant keywords to your campaign AND show you their monthly search volume. Coming up with the right keywords to promote in a niche is sometimes a bothersome task, especially if your client doesn’t even have a general idea to what keywords he needs promoted. One of the basic SEO rules is you need a diverse range of short, medium and long tail keywords to properly tackle a niche. This tool, combined with Ranking Discovery, can yield some amazing results in that regard and let you run a much more complete SEO campaign with more quality keywords, and as a result, more organic traffic.
High keyword quota – So a modest organic SEO campaign might require you to keep track of 30 different keywords of five different types (global rank, local rank, mobile rank, Yahoo! and Bing rank) totaling in the need to track at least 150 different keyword combinations. Having a SERP tracker that allows a large keyword quota per plan will give you room to breathe and expand without the need to upgrade to a possibly much more expensive plan. You never know what sort of client you might land, and you need room to grow if a sudden fortunate expansion will be required. PRT has one of the biggest keyword quotas per plan on the market. That’s why you have to be mindful of a SERP tracker’s price-per-keyword!
Here is more about why you need a high quota:
The SERP tracking basics for every SEO campaign
REAL ranks – The most important reason why an SEO expert needs a SERP tracker to begin with – getting real unbiased ranks. Because of Google’s highly advanced personalization algorithms, manual rank checking simply doesn’t work and hasn’t for many years. Google search is heavily personalized and is influenced by factors such as Google’s geo-targeting capabilities (which are VERY accurate, to say the least), cookies, the platform (mobile or desktop), your search history, your Google profile, and others. Using incognito mode or a proxy server unfortunately doesn’t filter personalization checks. Only a good SERP tracker can bypass that and show you the clearest picture of how your websites rank. Checking ranks manually would be the same as checking someone’s temperature by placing your hand on their forehead instead of using a thermometer. PRT has the only 100% accurate rank tracking algorithm on the market. If that’s not a time and money saver, I don’t know what is. Not to mention, it’s far more professional to know actual unbiased ranks. Still want to check manually? Best of luck with that.
Order and clarity of data – One of the most basic reasons an SEO expert would get a SERP tracker – gathering all their relevant ranking data in one convenient place instead of checking each individual rank separately. The ability to organize your data the way you need and have clear data visualization that will allow you to understand the key points in one glance is key to efficient work – clear organized data for a clear and organized mind. The truth is, some SERP trackers just have messy user interfaces, but the good news is you don’t have to settle for them. Get a SERP tracker that you can understand. PRT has one of the slickest and most easy-to-read data presentation, and it was designed to make your life as an SEO expert a lot easier. Also, you have the ability to organize your data the way you like and need using elements such as Groups, Tags and Filters.
Cloud-based service –Having all your data stored in the cloud makes it secure. Not being worried about losing important data will give you head space to think about what matters – like running a successful SEO campaign and making you and your client money. PRT is a cloud-based service. You don’t need to install or keep any programs; just log in from anywhere and see your control panel. Also, there are virtually no down times, and your data is safe in the mighty, vast cloud.
Local rank tracking – Local tracking is one of several highly important abilities SERP trackers have in today’s SEO environment. In the beginning of search engine history, there was one universal rank for every website, and it didn’t matter where you searched from: a person from Paris and a person from New York would see the same data for a website. However, that is all in the past, and Google has almost absolute geo-targeting capabilities to make ranks more relevant to a person’s location. There is no longer one universal rank, and knowing ranks based on location couldn’t be more vital if you want to get the clearest picture of how your websites rank in relevant locations. For example, if you have a pet food delivery service in Colorado, you would probably need to know local ranks in that area. More on that HERE:
How to get the clearest and most accurate picture of your Google ranks
Daily ranks and updates on demand – Ranks change all the time, and you need to be able to know the most recent position your ranks were in. Some SERP trackers update your ranks once a week and make it seem like you get a very large keyword quota, but that is just selling stale old bread in a fresh package, so be careful. PRT updates all your ranks daily and can even give you 2 additional updates on demand whenever YOU need them. This is a great gauge to know if your strategy works in almost real time.
Mobile rank tracking – This is an incredibly important feature. As you know, mobile ranks are different than desktop ranks simply because they are influenced by other factors, such as where the person is physically searching from. Also, Google determines websites’ mobile visibility by various factors, one of which is whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. More than HALF of all searches are done via mobile devices, a figure that will just keep growing (people who don’t have a desktop PC probably have a mobile phone), which means knowing your mobile ranks is even MORE important than knowing your desktop ranks. PRT’s system is very aware of that, and we give you the option to check location-based mobile ranks (the only proper way, since all mobile ranks are geo targeted). Oddly enough, some SERP trackers on the market don’t offer this very needed option. More on that HERE:
Are you abandoning your website’s mobile ranks?
Yahoo! and Bing ranks – These are sometimes neglected by SERP trackers, but those two take a huge chunk of the search engine market and account for a staggering THIRD of all searches, meaning your biggest client might actually be searching using one of them. If you want a more complete SEO campaign that targets the entire market and not just two-thirds, you need to care about those ranks. Yahoo! and Bing don’t have a tendency for devastating updates like Google that will knock your ranks around, and they share a similar ranking algorithm, so you actually optimize for one but get both! PRT can track those ranks easily.
Amazon and YouTube ranks – These are the biggest search engines in their respective fields (actually surpassing Google), and each has its own unique ranking algorithm. If you get a client that needs you to promote them there, you’ll be very thankful to discover your SERP tracker can track those ranks, instead of having to shop for a new SERP tracker that can, or paying for an additional one that does. PRT can track those ranks flawlessly. All in all, with PRT you can track your websites’ rankings across a huge range of search engines, including local rank tracking on 187 Google sites, 35 Yahoo! sites, 32 Bing sites, YouTube and all Amazon Local sites.
You can refer to this guide whenever you’re test running a new SERP tracker, and if anyone ever asks you why they need a SERP tracker when they can manually check their ranks, be sure to bring some of these features up!
PRT naturally has all of those features, and then some. So be sure to take our system for a spin if you haven’t already!
