Best tools for checking Google rankings

One question I often get is how to best follow your Google ranking. I have two standard answers: Use Wincher if you have a small site with few keywords only. Use SEMRush if you have a larger site, if you represent an agency, if you have many sites, or if you have more needs than just following rankings.

We look more closely at rank tracking and these two tools

If you are writing content or doing seo you are probably very interested in how your good site performs in Google’s search results. To find out your Google ranking, you thus need a rank tracker, a tool that in a neutral way can check and follows your positions over time. Here we will look at two such tools, one cheap and one very advanced. We’re getting started!

Rank tracking?

You who already know what a rank tracker is can skip this paragraph and go straight to the comparison. But to the rest of you, I will try to explain what a rank tracker is here:

You can get some kind of overview by simply Googling your keyword in incognito windows in the browser, or by checking the Google Search Console. However, it will be a lot of manual labor if you have many keywords and articles you want to follow Google ranking for. Therefore, an entire industry has emerged with SAAS tools to keep up with just this. With such a tool, you see how your ranking has varied from day to day, and thus also how different activities you have done have affected your ranking up or down.

2 recommended rank trackers for checking Google rankings

We look at cheap and good Wincher and professional and great SEMRush.

The cheap option that is good enough in most cases – Wincher

Wincher is a Swedish rank tracking tool that is the cheapest I have ever found. My wife Lina and I use this for some of her own sites, which rarely have more than 100 keywords we want to be seen on.

The cheapest account on Wincher costs 24 € per month and includes rank tracking for 10 websites, as well as 500 keywords. 

Read also: The Cheapest Rank Tracker? Wincher Review.

This is what Wincher looks like when you log in. Here is one of our Swedish projects showcased, a project about sport bras, Sport-bh.nu. We see rankings for it in tables like this:

Let me explain a little about what the different parts mean.

The status box at the top:

1. Checking the development of the site in the search results the past month.

The first box shows how many keywords have risen and how many have dropped in rankings in the last month (green vs. red bars). Here we see that we have increased more than decreased recently.

The next box is the average position of the words we follow. We thus have an average position of 15.6 on the approximately 70 words we follow for this project.

The traffic box is the estimated traffic for these keywords in the last month. From these keywords, Wincher estimates that we have received about 590 visitors in the last month. The estimated number of visitors is calculated from the position of the word and the search volume. The first place on a word gives about 30% of the search volume in visitor numbers. A second-place gives us a little less. And so on.

The fourth and last box are positions per day. This site has four first places and two 2-3 positions, as well as 21 words in position 4-10 (first page on Google). And so on.

2. Now let’s move on to the more interesting part, the rankings table:

Here we see all the words we follow.

In the first column, we see the words. For example, the word sport-bh push up (sports bra push up, sorry for the Swedish) on row 7.

In column two we see which page on our site ranks for this keyword. By clicking on the icon next to the URL, we can directly open that page in the browser and see if there is anything we should improve there to rank even better.

The third column “features” is not so important for most people, but here you can see if Google’s search results for this particular keyword have any special “snippets”. These can be images, Google shopping ads, site links, featured snippets, or the like. If your site is featured in a special search result, this purple will shine. If there are only special results in the search results, but you’re not one of them, then the icon is gray.

The fourth column is the most interesting. Here is the position we are ranking on. We see that on our word “sport-bh push up” (sports bra push up, sorry for the Swedish) we are in position 4. Not really in the top 3 as we want to be, but still on the front page of Google. The table is now sorted by this column, so we see our best rankings first. It is also possible to sort according to other columns. In most cases, a position of 1 to 10 means that you are on the first page of Google. 11-20 the second page, and so on.

The fifth column, Change, represents the changes in rankings for this particular keyword during the selected time period. The default setting is one month. This shows that we have dropped two steps, from place 2 to 4 on our example keyword, and we should perhaps make some improvements on the page.

The sixth column, CPC, means cost per click. How much does one Google Ads click cost for this word? Nothing really important in this context, but good to know, as higher click prices often mean better sales from that word’s visitors (if someone is willing to pay a lot to get traffic to their site, they probably do it on keywords that also convert to sales) . It can be valuable to have a look at if you need to prioritize your keywords at some point.

The seventh column, Volume, is an important column. Here you can see how many people are Googling this word per month. If we want more traffic, we of course want to be seen on keywords with a lot of volumes. However, those words also tend to have more competition and be more difficult to rank well on.

The eighth column, Traffic, is the estimated traffic we get from our ranking on this word. A word with more volume, or where you rank higher, of course, gives greater estimated traffic.

At the top of the page, there is an option to choose the timeframe you want to check rankings for. The standard choice is one month. You can also group words and filter by groups here, by positions (eg just look at words that are not yet on the front page), or filter by only looking at words containing specific words.

Let us now click on a keyword in the table to see more info about the Google ranking for that particular word. We choose to click on the word “vadderad sport bh” (padded sports bras, Swedish again here) where we rank in place 5:

Here we now see how we have ranked on that word every single day, and also how the competitors have ranked. By moving the mouse pointer over the line, you will see in more detail the position on that particular day for you or your competitor.

We see that we have risen from place 8 to place 5 on the 23rd of September, and that corresponds well with when we added some content about that specific word to that article. It was added a few days earlier, and here we see when we then rose in Google rankings.

Here you can also see that competitor Sportamore ranks stably above us, in place 2, and that Stayinplace is increasing its ranking a bit compared to the beginning of the period. However, they are still far down on the third page of Google. Competitor Missmary is dizzy with something at the bottom of the search results, they ranked 80th for a couple of weeks, but then dropped again.

Other functions in Wincher

There are some other features also in the purple menu at the top. An interesting feature is ” competitors ” where you see your rankings in the same way as in the table we previously looked at, but also the competitors side by side.

Try Wincher rank tracking

Hope you learned something about rank tracking, and especially about how to do it in the cheap tool Wincher. You can find Wincher here, and by following that link you can also test the tool for free for 14 days without having to fill in credit card information.

The cheapest account on Wincher costs 24 € per month, and includes rank tracking for 10 websites, with 500 keywords.

2. The most advanced rank tracking tool – SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the tools I use most in my job as a search engine optimizer. If you want a really premium SEO suite that contains the best rank tracking and about 30 other tools for SEO, Google ads, Social media, Research, and content creation, SEMRush is a very good choice. 

However, it was because of its rank tracking tool that I chose to start using it myself in the first place. This in combination with the fact that back then they had the largest database of Finnish and Swedish keywords for keyword analysis and competitor analysis.

SEMRush is a SAAS company that has now become more or less standard for measurement and working with SEO for many companies. I often come across customers who have SEMRush as their tool, and they can then easily invite my SEMRush account as a user there so that I can help them with their campaigns, and we can work on the same project without the need of me duplicating it in my own account.

Here is an overview of tools that SEMRush contains

As we see, “position tracking” was around already in 2012. Shortly after that, I started using this tool as well, and is still using it as my main SEO tool.

Here we see an overview of SEMRush position tracking for my wife Lina’s fitness blog. As you can see, it looks quite similar to Wincher, but by default we also see 4 competitors’ positions here as well, as well as a few more SERP features.

Here we can also tag words to group them, we can make notes on special dates in the graph to see how different actions affected rankings, and we can check where and how we are seen in featured snippets. 

If you want to optimize to take a place in the featured snippet, SEMRush is very good at finding other sites that have taken up space there, so that you can then just create a better “featured snippet” than them, and steal their first place.

Here we see a featured snippet for a specific search term, these are easy to find for your own or competitors’ sites using SEMRush

Check more in detail how to use SEMRush position tracking by checking this video:

SEMRush costs from $ 99 per month, and can be enlarged to any size depending on what you need.

A business subscription costs $ 199 per month.

A “Guru” subscription costs $ 399 per month.

There are also opportunities to create your own agreements with SEMRush, for example, if you have to follow a lot of keywords, or if you need many users or similar.

Try SEMRush for free for a few days

I really hope you learned something about rank tracking and following Google rankings in this article, maybe you even already choose the right tool for you?

Questions and answers about following Google rankings with a rank tracker

* I get a certain commission if you choose to buy a rank tracker from my recommendations. My opinions about these are, however, completely genuine, I have recommended these two rank trackers countless times “offline” even though I did not receive compensation for it.