How to Track Your Keywords on MacOS and Windows for Free

One of the most important things to do when you’re trying to grow a site is to measure your results. After all, how can you tell how well you’re doing with your marketing efforts otherwise? Identifying your top keywords and tracking your ranking for them in the search results is essential.
Unfortunately, marketing companies know that. The data they provide is just too important and too useful to leave behind once you start using it. You become a captive audience. Prices for rank-tracking apps are high, because what are you going to do? Not use some of the most valuable data around?
It’s not even just that they’re expensive, either. I recently did a study of rank-tracking software for my content marketing agency. I found that, across the board, rank-tracking apps and tools have jumped in price by 91% over the last year. That’s a lot! Only one didn’t increase (and it’s on the list below), and one jumped by a massive 1,000%.
This all means you have three options.
- You can pay whatever high fee the tools are asking for and just accept it as a cost of doing business.
- You can seek out cheaper tools or tools with one-time fees that let you gather the data you need without the big names doing it for you.
- You can rely on free tools that may not give you the best, most comprehensive data but aren’t going to break the bank either.
I personally prefer a combination of three and two. I like to use free tools when I can, but I’m also not above paying for a tool if it proves worth the money. And trust me, I’ve tried out a lot of tools. It’s hard to find one I haven’t at least given a shot.
So, for the rest of this post, I’ve come up with options for both number three and number two. I’ll start with the tools that are actually free and that I think are worth using. Then, I’ll give you some of the paid tools that are still affordable and worth the money.
If you have anything to add to the list that I didn’t cover, let me know in the comments! Maybe there’s a good reason I didn’t include it, or maybe it’s one I somehow overlooked. Either way, it’s useful information, so I encourage your comments.
Free Keyword Tracking Tools
First, let’s start with the actual free keyword tracking tools.
Free tools are tricky. If they’re free, it means there’s some kind of drawback to using them.
Usually, that drawback is that they’re harder to use, require you to do the scraping yourself, or require a lot of hands-on tinkering to get working. You might need to dig into proxy lists and rate limits to make sure you aren’t blocked by Google. You might have caps on how many keywords you can check and how often. You might just not be able to get as much data.
The benefit, of course, is just that they’re free. You’re still “paying” for them, in terms of the time you spend on them, but for many marketers, that’s better than the monetary cost would be. Keep in mind as well that a good proxy list can be expensive itself.
What are my top free keyword-tracking tools?
SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker
SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker is included with the PowerSuite free plan, alongside the WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant. You can track an unlimited number of keywords with it, but you’re restricted on a lot of the advanced features.
For example, with the free plan, you don’t get to save projects, schedule tasks, save reports, or export data.
I like SEO PowerSuite quite a bit, and I pay for a higher-tier plan, so I’m a little biased about their functionality. I do think that the free plan is still useful if you only have a relatively small number of keywords to track or you just want the occasional at-a-glance tracking. You can get around the lack of saving reports through screenshots and manual saving, even if it’s tedious. Tedium is the name of the game when you’re using free tools, though, so you probably expect that.
Ahrefs Free Rank Checker
Ahrefs is by far one of my favorite and most-used SEO platforms. They integrate rank tracking into several of their tools, but I’m not talking about those today.
The free rank tracker, linked above, is a super simple version of it. You plug in a keyword and a domain, and they give you a quick report of the SERPs for that query. You get:
- Where your site ranks in the SERPs for the keyword, if it ranks at all.
- The top ten search results, including title and URL.
- The DR, UR, number of links, linking domains, traffic estimates, and keyword estimates for the top three results.
For anything more than that, you need to pay for an Ahrefs starter plan. The starter plan is still limited access, but it only costs $30 per month, so it’s still reasonably affordable. Fortunately, the free rank checker is entirely free and unlimited use. It’s just a little tedious to keep plugging in each keyword individually.
Serposcope
Serposcope is a rank-tracking program you download, unlike the two web-based apps I already listed above. It works for Windows, MacOS, and even Linux.
This has some pros and cons. Rank tracking is all about harvesting data from Google, but Google doesn’t actually provide that information in an easy-to-gather way. There’s no API you can tap into. Companies like Ahrefs use thousands of machines and virtual connections to gather big data. Other apps do spot-checks so they aren’t constantly pinging Google and risking getting IP blocked.
An app like Serposcope means it’s your computer doing that harvesting. The more keywords you want to track, the more connections it needs to make, the more searches, the more data scraping. If you’re too fast or aggressive with it, you can end up blocked, which can disrupt both your data gathering and your casual use.
The usual solution to this is a list of web proxies to rotate through. Web proxies mask your identity and make your connection go through an external server. They can be extremely variable and fickle, and maintaining a good proxy list is a whole task in and of itself. But it’s what you need to do if you’re going to use Serposcope for more than just a couple of keywords.
What I like about Serposcope is that it doesn’t just show your rank; it shows how your rank changes over time, both since the last check and in a graphic form. It’s nice for at-a-glance changes and for more detailed monitoring.
It can be a bit of a pain to set up and keep a refreshed proxy list, which is both tedious and occasionally costly, but it’s worthwhile to have a tool you control.
SerpBear
Like Serposcope, SerpBear is a program you run locally. Since it’s just a code repository, you can install it on a server or other environment as well, if you have access to one. The trick is, it works by integrating your Google account to pull data from Google Ads, and to integrate data into your Search Console as well as its own dashboard.
Once you have it all installed and configured, SerpBear is as powerful as some of the best big-name rank trackers out there. You can track unlimited keywords, get email notifications of position changes, get data exported as an API for your own uses, get CSV exports, and even a mobile app version.
The trick is that it’s surprisingly difficult to get set up and running. Well, that’s not quite true. It’s fairly easy as far as DIY apps go, but if you’re not familiar with Docker, GitHub, and fiddling with developer environments, you’ll have a bit of a steep learning curve before you can have it all set up.
There are a ton of useful functions and features you can tweak to your needs, and it can scale very easily to meet your needs, especially if you slap it on a server. Give it a look if you’re comfortable with this kind of program!
Not-Quite-Free Keyword Tracking Tools
To round things out, I want to talk about some of the cheaper paid options that are still worth using. Right now, some of the rank trackers out there can cost hundreds of dollars per month. It’s a ton of money to shell out for the convenience of not having to juggle proxies. Some rank trackers fall in the middle, though, and those are the ones I’ve tried to zero in on.
Paying for an app has the biggest benefit of handling all of the tedious data harvesting themselves, and you don’t need to care about proxies. On the other hand, you definitely pay for it, so it really comes down to which is more valuable to you.
SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Tracker
I listed this one in the free section because the free plan is useful enough. I do highly recommend the pro version, though. It’s $30 per month for a one-year plan or $20 per month if you pay for three years in advance. The ability to save projects alone is probably worth that.
The enterprise version is more expensive but allows data exports, which can also be handy. It’s up to you and your budget which one is worth going after.
Ahrefs
The actual Ahrefs rank tracker is almost obnoxiously good. From simple rank tracking to metrics like “share of voice” and position distribution, it gives you so much useful data it’s impossible not to recommend.
The downside is you need to use the starter plan, which is $30 per month and is somewhat limited. The Lite plan is good too, but it’s $130 per month, which is way more than I want to recommend on a list like this.
Mangools SERPWatcher
Mangools is such an interesting company. They have a ton of very interesting and useful tools, almost all of which are either just a hair too expensive or a little too underpowered to make it into my common-use lists. If you really like their ecosystem, you can do pretty much anything you want. If you like to pick and choose the best app for any given purpose, you’ll probably always put them in the top five, but never your number one.
In this case, though, the rank tracker is actually quite solid for this purpose. It’s a very focused rank tracker with overall performance indexing, traffic estimates, and other useful data. The nice thing is that unlike other tools recently, they actually decreased the price of their starter plan, albeit by $1. It’s a little limited – you only get 100 keyword lookups per day – but it’s pretty solid for a single site.
Pro Rank Tracker
This is another rank tracker that is pretty good for a single site or small business. It gets pretty expensive if you need to track thousands of keywords for multiple sites, but such is the life of an agency, eh? The starter plan is only $50 per month for 500 tracked keywords. It’s fairly generous with unlimited reports, not double-counting a keyword that shows up in both SERPs and the enhanced boxes, and with daily updates. Overall, it’s not a bad option.
So, what do you think? Do you have a rank tracker that you really like, but which I didn’t include on the list? If so, I’d love to hear about it, as well as why you think it’s as good as or better than the things already on this list.
For reference, I’ve tried to keep my recommendations to platforms usable by small businesses for under $50 per month. I know there are a bunch of decent apps for $75 or so, but that really pushes the budget for a lot of businesses I know, especially for something that is “just” data. I’m especially interested in apps or programs that are either free or under $30 per month. Let me know if you know of any that meet that definition!
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