The best competitor tracking and keyword research tools : Web & Search Engine Optimizers : RippleSmith

Rank Tracker is an SEO program for selecting keywords, tracking website positions, analyzing search results and determining the complexity of website promotion using certain keywords. It also simplifies the diagnostics of the presence of a filter (sanctions) on the website and will help in case of promoting a local business website. And if you need to create reports, Rank Tracker can make this work simpler as well.

Сompetitors’ keywords

Rank Tracker has keyword research and analytics tools allowing to search for keywords of competing websites in a huge online database. Thus, in a few minutes, you can get a list of keywords for which the website you are interested in is already ranked in the search results and in what position.

That is, the program may collect keywords both in real-time from “external” sources, such as the Google AdWords keyword planner, but also connects to the Rank Tracker developer database and may take data from this database. In this case, not only the information gathering process is significantly accelerated, but there is no threat of your IP being banned. Checking the keyword rankings has become much simpler with this tool.

According to the developers, the database is updated daily. The database contains data about website keywords and the history of their positions in the search results. Also, you can get information about the promotion complexity of the database.

The following search options are available:

Search engine and type of search results: for desktop computers (normal results) or for mobile devices (mobile results).
A list of negative keywords, so that the results you don’t need would not be included in the collected list.
The exception of keywords that are already present in Target KeyWords – Keyword map.
Getting additional data for the words: the number of requests, estimated traffic, competition level, cost per click (in Google AdWords), keyword difficulty, KEI, expected the number of advertising transitions (in Google AdWords ), estimated cost of advertising per month (in Google AdWords). This data may be collected from the online database or in real-time.

The Keyword Difficulty column indicates the complexity of website promotion for a given word in a given search engine and in a given search type. Keyword Difficulty is not specific to your website. This metric is calculated based on the top 10 websites in one of the search engines for a given word. Various factors are analyzed within these top pages. These factors include InLink Rank, number of pages that link to a domain, etc. The greater the complexity of the word is, the harder it is to outperform the competitors to rank for a given word.

In addition to competitors’ keywords and related positions, you will also receive information about the types of snippets and the special type of snippets utilized on the top 100 ranked pages.

Search, sorting and filtering tools will be available to you for the convenience of working with keywords. You can also customize the table to your needs by adding, deleting, and moving columns. Moreover, you can export data to CSV. An example of such a report can be found at the end of this article above the comments.

You can add tags and color tags to words. You can add the address of the website in question to competitors if you wish so that it is more convenient to track your competitors and compare them with yours.

When you find out what your competitors’ keywords are, you can add the words of interest to the module Target Keywords – Keyword map. Moreover, you can add them to an existing group or create a new one.

Keyword lists

There are 8 sections in the Keyword Research module.

Ranking Keywords – It was explained above in the article.
Keyword Suggestions – Keyword selection based on the data from Keyword Scheduler (Google AdWords), KeywordDiscovery.
Autocomplete Tools – Selection of keywords based on the data from search tips: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, Ask, Yandex.
Related Searches – Selection of keywords based on the data from a list of similar search queries Google, Bing, Ask.
Domain Research – Selection of keywords based on the analysis of a specific URL. Rank Tracker will analyze the address you specified and suggest keyword variants based on the data from such sources as: Google AdWords, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. To retrieve the data by URL from the Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you need to have access to the accounts where this website is attached. This way you can work on expanding the keyword research of your website. Another source of information is to track your competitors. In contrast to Ranking Keywords, the search is performed not in the online database, but directly on the specified page. In the summary table, in addition to the data already reviewed, there are # of Competitors and TF-IDF (Avg). # of Competitors columns – when you enter a keyword for analysis, the program tracks your competitors by this word and analyzes their pages, offering you a list of keywords that they also use. This column indicates how many competitors of all those found use this word. If 5 is 62% of the total, then 8 competitors in total were found. TF-IDF (Avg) is the average TF-IDF for a word/ phrase on competing pages.
Related Questions When using this method, the program substitutes certain question words for the specified keyword and collects the obtained variants from Google Autocomplete.
Keyword Combinations Keyword selection based on “algorithms”: Word Shuffle, Word Combination, Spelling Errors.
Keyword Sandbox – It is discussed below in the article.

Keyword research tools

There is a section in Word Analysis – Keyword Sandbox By default, all keywords found using various keyword research and analytics tools in the Ranking Keywords, Keyword Suggestions, Autocomplete Tools, Related Searches, Domain Research, Related Questions и Keyword Combinations sections automatically fall into it.

Positions for these words are not tracked, but you can add them to Target Words – Keyword map when you consider it necessary. After adding, you can check the positions for them.

You can create, rename and delete groups of keywords. You can also transfer words from group to group. You can also create a group with a “black list” of keywords, instead of removing them from the project, so that during subsequent compiling of the Keyword Map from different sources, you will no longer encounter them.

For convenience, the keyword table in the Keyword Sandbox can be used to filter, search, sort, and change the composition of columns. For example, you can enable the display of the Found in the column to see which source the word was found in. There is also a special filter that will help you quickly display the keywords found during the last search, today or this week.

Rank Tracker can automatically separate keywords into groups (clustering). By default, clustering is carried out at the middle level of semantic similarity. You can change the level of similarity or even disable clustering in the settings. Changes in the settings will be applied to the keywords found in subsequent searches.

If you need to change the grouping for already existing groups, then in the group menu there is the Regroup words in the list option.

When you collect additional data on the keywords in the groups, all estimated information will be displayed for the entire group in the upper part of the window:

Number of queries.
Estimated traffic.
Cost of traffic acquisition (based on the cost of advertising in Google AdWords).
Promotion complexity.

By grouping the keywords with the pages, one can judge whether it is worth promoting in this group or not on the basis of such information.

As you can see, the software tools for compiling the semantic kernel in Rank Tracker are complemented and improved in terms of both functionality and usability. A new module allowing to learn the keywords of competitors is the best tool and an excellent addition in terms of work on the semantics of the website. A trial of this checker tool will take all your doubts away.

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