What is the best way to track rank?
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I'm curious what tools and tracking mechanisms everyone uses to track rank, especially with all of the changes in the last year. I've read a ton of articles that say even in 2014, rank will continue to matter, but besides using the keyword rank tool in Moz, I was hoping to learn what everyone else uses to track rank on a keyword and page level (are those two separate things?).
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Thanks for your input. I started playing around with the Rank Checker Firefox extension this morning, and I like it so far. I was just hoping to add more tools to my arsenal in addition to Moz's keyword ranking tool.
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Raven is a good tool for various SEO strategies, but I'm not sure I would recommend it for rank tracking. Raven just grabs their ranking data from your Webmaster Tools account and puts it in a pretty chart for you. You can get the exact same data for free by logging into Webmaster Tools.
We use Authority Labs for our rank tracking. It's really powerful and flexible and keeps your historical data so you can watch your ranking trends over several months or years. Pricing starts at $49/month - https://authoritylabs.com/pricing/
The Keyword Rankings tool in Moz Analytics is also very good. It can pull in data from Google Analytics so you can see how rankings are directly impacting your traffic.
On the free side of things, SEO Book's Rank Checker extension for Firefox can cover your basic needs - http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
Hope this helps!
Tim
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We have been looking into using Raven Tools to track rank, it gets data from Google and Bing and so far seems to be pretty accurate; it also allows you to track an unlimited number of sites. We are a small company so we also manually track rank through screen shots every 6 months. Hope that helps!
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