Why you should take Price-Per-Keyword into account

Today we are going to discuss the elusive and rarely used price-per-keyword parameter. This parameter is the most relevant of them all as far as price is concerned, and yet very few mention it at all, if ever… even though it relates to the MAIN reason you would need a SERP tracker, and that is tracking keywords on search engines. Acknowledging this parameter will help you decide more lucidly when you shop for a SERP tracker and allow you to better plan any future business expansion. If you sampled the market even a bit, you noticed that every SERP tracking tool offers their own unique keyword quota that they can track for you at all times for a monthly fee. To get the PPK, you simply need to divide the monthly fee by the number of keywords tracked. For example, if a service asks for $100 per month and the keyword quota is 1,000 keywords, then the price per keyword will be $0.10. That’s actually the standard these days for the “big” well-known tools (and just plain expensive, but that’s for another article).

We actually did an article about this a while back where I broke down and compared all the major SERP trackers by their price-per-keyword parameters, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t already. There are lots of great tips in there about choosing the right SERP tracker in general:

How to choose the right Rank tracking tool for your SEO agency

	Average monthly price per keyword
ProRankTracker	$0.04
RankTrackr	$0.08
Siteoscope	$0.08
Authority Labs	$0.1
MOZ	$0.11
SERPs	$0.1
SerpBook	$0.08
Rank Ranger	$0.1
Advanced Web Ranking	$0.1
SEM Rush	$0.1

Now we need to look at what counts as a keyword – most often it’s a keyword + URL + search engine combo, but several tools out there calculate it differently, so take note. To give you an example of the most common way to count keywords – “Gentleman’s monocles” for the URL “monoclesareus.com” tracked on google.com will count as one. This becomes crucial, as we need to consider volume necessity – the total number of keywords your combined campaigns require for you to track on all needed fronts. As a general rule of thumb, always plan to track more keywords than you think by at least 20% (and that’s a conservative estimate). Even the most modest campaigns regularly require a quota of as much as 100 keywords to get the most accurate results.

Read more about that here:

Why you simply can’t do SEO without a SERP tracker

The SERP tracking basics for every SEO campaign

So, let’s say you currently work on four modest campaigns, which means you would need to look for a keyword quota of 500 keywords. In this case, $0.05 PPK vs. $0.10 PPK makes a whole lot of difference in the long run, especially if you consider the future and the possibility your clients suddenly want to expand. The sudden price bump can be unpleasant to say the least. If you are planning to grow as a business, PPK is very relevant.

The number of URLs that can be tracked in a plan can make things tricky, although we (along with a few other SERP trackers) don’t limit the number of URLs that can be tracked. Others provide a handsome amount of keywords while restricting your number of URLs, which can end up being very limiting depending on what sort of SEO campaign you’re running.

You need to determine the best per-keyword value that’s represented by the PPK parameter, and this is subjective to your SEO needs. For that, we need to see the included features for a certain PPK, and we need to know whether those features are essential, rarely used, or redundant in your case. Some tools bloat up on features for a bigger price—features which, in most cases, you don’t even need. For example, let’s take an SEO audit, which you need to do only occasionally – does it really make sense for you to be paying monthly for a relatively rarely used feature, or does it makes more sense to locate a free tool which can do it for you, or simply pay per audit whenever you need one?

Examine the number of white label reports you can generate. The best services will offer unlimited reports, as that makes the most sense for the average SERP tracker user. Let’s say you generated the wrong report by accident… you don’t want the report counter to be affected. Also, depending on what client you’re working for, you might need to send reports to a team of people and not just a single individual.

Lastly for this article, but not least, is the number of updates on demand. How many times a day will your rank tracker check your ranks to give you a fresh picture? Rank updates use the full resources of the respected system to check for all your current keyword positions in real time. The market standard for this is once every 24 hours, however there are tools (PRT included) that can offer updates on demand. These tools can check your positions more than once in 24 hours, giving you several times the value for possibly the same price. Getting updated, fresh data several times a day can be a great advantage for a fast-paced hard-hitting SEO strategy that would benefit from knowing immediate signals and queues. This feature can be an amazing strategical gauge for the right type of SEO plan.

That’s about it. As for us, as I’ve mentioned PRT offers you up to 3 updates on demand, unlimited reports, and we currently have the BEST price per keyword on the market. We have one of the biggest keyword quotas on the market today. We can manage all that by being strictly SEO goal oriented without including bloated and rarely used features in our tool – just fresh, ACCURATE ranks and crisp, easy to read reports for you and your clients! Give us a try today!