Best Way to check SERP or Keyword Ranking

What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings? If you target a new keyword or key phrase and wanted to check the progress of it’s ranking, would you just search Google and scroll through the results?

The answer is, Yes. That will be the best thing to do if you feel that the keyword’s rank is below 100. But, that’s not the main solution. First, that’s a time consuming process and you can not check all the Google datacenters manually. So, I decided to do a little research and make your life easier.

The first thing I did is searched Google for Google SERP Checker and that returned some online tools to check SERP. Sadly, when I tested the first 10 results, atleast 7 of them are broken or not retuning the correct result. May be the recent change in Google API’s made those tools broken. Only SEO SERP returned a result close to the manual check.

To my luck, browsing the results pages, I came up with PC based tool called Free Monitor for Google and amaizinly, that was retuning the same results when you search manually. You can add keywords to track as many as you like. You can also set the depth of the SERP to reduce the queries to Google. The best part of this tool is that you can add your own Search API so that you IP don’t get a temporary ban in Google. I am really happy with that tool and using it to track my keywords ranking.

If you are a Firefox user, you can also check these two addons. SeoQuake SEO and SERP Analytics. These are also nice tools to check SERP, but I still prefer that tool from cleverstat.

I found some other ways to track keyword rankings. Like, using the keywords page in Google Webmaster Tools and checking the Search Engine Referral pages in Google Analytics or StatCounter, but they are not reliable and not real time.

Just on a side note, when you target a new keyword, you should also consider the long tail versions of the same. Like, if your site is about selling “homemade cakes”, you should also consider targeting “homemade cakes in london” or “homemade cakes shop” or something similar. High SERP for those long tail keywords will be easier when you target the main keyword and work hard on it.