To grow your SEO, one crucial part is understanding where you’re already ranking and working on growing those rankings.

Here’s a question, how are you supposed to track your rankings over time?

Sure, there are some options, but there’s no simple + free option.

• Google Search Console gives you the rankings data, but it can be a cumbersome tool. It’s excellent, and you should be using Google Search Console, but it’s a bit clunky for tracking keyword + page performance over time.
• SEMRush is a paid SEO/SEM tool with a keyword tracker (and a lot more) with plans starting at $99/mo. SEMRush is a valuable tool (I use it every day), but it isn’t affordable for lots of ecommerce small businesses.

For years I’ve been looking for a good + free keyword rank tracker tool that’s simple to use and not packed full of ads for the junk you don’t need.

Nothing worth recommending.

That is, until last week.

A friend in an SEO community pointed me toward Rank Tracker (https://seotesting.com/ranktracker). (Non-affiliate link, this is an honest + enthusiast recommendation.)

Rank Tracker’s value proposition is pretty sweet: Free Rank Tracker.

• Track up to 500 keywords per site
• Based on your Google Search Console data
• Compare 7/30/90 day and yearly averages

I spend an hour trying out Rank Tracker. I set up an account, added a few sites, and reviewed the data and user experience.

Rank Tracker is the real deal:

• It pulls your rankings from actual Google Search Console data
• It has a good user interface and isn’t packed full of ads.
• Plus, it’s free.

Rank Tracker is from SEOTesting.com, a popular and trusted SEO tool that has been around since 2016, not a fly-by-night newcomer to the market.

Digression: Why would SEOTesting release a free tool like Rank Tracker without ads? Marketing, link building, and lead generation, among other reasons.

The landing page for the app is on SEOTesting.com [https://seotesting.com/ranktracker], so linking to the tool helps their overall SEO.

And they hope some free users will stick around and upgrade to a paid account, a standard freemium lead generation play in the software as a service world.

All that to say, I’m pretty confident that Rank Tracker from SEOTesting.com isn’t going to steal all your data or bombard you with scammy stuff. This seems like an excellent free tool. And a great free option for Shopify stores.

And it’s easy to set up. It took me under five minutes to:

• Register a new (free) account)
• Connect to Google Search Console
• Select five keywords from a list of my top 500 keywords
• Look at the table with recent keyword performance

I added DoubleYourEcommerce.com. Here’s what the top 10 keywords by position report looks like for the dozen keywords I selected:

These rankings are your Google Search Console data, so you can be confident that it’s pretty accurate.

That does mean that having Google Search Console set up is a requirement. But that’s okay. Every Shopify store should be using Google Search Console, and search Console is a great, free set of tools from Google to monitor the health + performance of your website. (Think of Search Console as the dashboard for your car with some diagnostic information mixed in.)

You can help grow your SEO by spending time over the winter holiday to :

• Sign up for Google Search Console (search.google.com/search-console/)
• Sign up for Rank Tracker by SEO Testing (https://seotesting.com/ranktracker)
• Connect Rank Tracker to your Google Search Console
• Select ~10-50 keywords from your top keywords

Then, when it comes time to work on your SEO in 2023, you can start by looking at your rank tracker and picking a page + keyword you want to improve.

Would you like some ‘do this, not that’ advice on what to improve to rank higher in Google?

With an SEO + Growth Video Teardown, you’ll get a long-form video (about an hour) with specific + personalized + ‘do this, not that’ advice on what your store can do to rank higher.

You can use this ‘do this, not that’ advice as your Q1 SEO punch list.

And if you order your SEO + Growth Teardown by Monday, December 19th, you’ll get your deliverables in your inbox on January 3rd.

Read more here: doubleyourecommerce.com/services/teardown/

Excelsior!

Kai