ThopHayt
Elite Member
- Jul 25, 2011
- 7,012
- 2,864
How are all these ranking tracking tools/softwares/sites/services still justifying their pricing schemes?
I'm seeing "cloud services" that track SERPS usually charging around $20 per month for tracking around 50 keywords. Thats $0.40 PER KEYWORD! PER MONTH! Even at half that price its unacceptable, frankly. The truth of the matter is that the market is absolutely saturated. You can't throw a rock around BHW without hitting somebody trying to sell a SERP tracking service in their footer. And none of this changes the facts that I'm still not convinced that SERP tracking doesn't actually hurt your rankings. Since having your keyword searched and paged to your results and then NOT CLICKED ON essentially makes your result take a click-through hit in Google/Bing. Sure, so did everybody else on your page and better, but the next page did not.
For this reason as well as cost I've gone to using Google and Bing themselves to track keyword progress. I focus more on impressions and FAR less on actual rank. After all, does it help you to rank #2 in a keyword that gets 10 impressions a month when you could have been getting 500 from a different bigger keyword at #35? Rank is irrelevant. Traffic is the name of the game and IMHO the actual SERP rank is a far smaller fact to highlight. And if it were not for people having to show clients "proof" SERP tracking in general wouldn't be near so popular. Lucky for the SERP tracking sites clients rarely ask about impressions per keyword.
I'm seeing "cloud services" that track SERPS usually charging around $20 per month for tracking around 50 keywords. Thats $0.40 PER KEYWORD! PER MONTH! Even at half that price its unacceptable, frankly. The truth of the matter is that the market is absolutely saturated. You can't throw a rock around BHW without hitting somebody trying to sell a SERP tracking service in their footer. And none of this changes the facts that I'm still not convinced that SERP tracking doesn't actually hurt your rankings. Since having your keyword searched and paged to your results and then NOT CLICKED ON essentially makes your result take a click-through hit in Google/Bing. Sure, so did everybody else on your page and better, but the next page did not.
For this reason as well as cost I've gone to using Google and Bing themselves to track keyword progress. I focus more on impressions and FAR less on actual rank. After all, does it help you to rank #2 in a keyword that gets 10 impressions a month when you could have been getting 500 from a different bigger keyword at #35? Rank is irrelevant. Traffic is the name of the game and IMHO the actual SERP rank is a far smaller fact to highlight. And if it were not for people having to show clients "proof" SERP tracking in general wouldn't be near so popular. Lucky for the SERP tracking sites clients rarely ask about impressions per keyword.
