All of us have been there – you have a brand new website that you’ve been working on. You’ve created some great content, built some good backlinks, and now you’re ready to see how you’re doing on the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, it’s not as easy as one might think to check and see how your site is doing for certain keywords.
There are many variables that go into where your website is displayed on a Google SERP page. Google’s results page can be ‘tainted’ by your browser’s cookies and previous search history, so it is best to have someone else do the checking for you. Plus, if you have a lot of keywords, this can be time consuming.
It is for these reasons that there are standalone tools called SERP Checkers that will search Google through a proxy server to give you a good idea of how your websites are performing on the Google results pages. Plenty of paid services have this feature built into their programs, but it can be tough to find free, full-featured sites that will do it as well.
Here are the three best free Google SERP Checkers, in no particular order:
WhatsMySERP is a great tool that allows you to easily track SERPs for multiple keywords. The easy to use tool allows you to track multiple domains and uses cookies to store your SERP results from day to day. It also has a built in SERP graph that shows you how your site has performed over time. Finally, you can register to ensure that your results are saved in their database.
Pros: Easy interface, great graphing feature
Cons: Must come back daily to manually update SERP results
RankCheckerAce’s site may seem a bit sparse, but that is because it’s features really show through in their daily emails. RankCheckerAce emails you results for your keywords every day. The email has a table of your domains, the keywords you’re looking to rank for, and how you’re doing today, yesterday, and last week. It even features results from Yahoo and Bing, as well as Google.
Pros: Daily emails, checks Yahoo and Bing as well
Cons: Have to wait for the daily email, no on-demand checking
While SEOSerp.com doesn’t have the design that WhatsMySerp does, it’s still a legitimate SERP checker. It’s results are punctuated by textual outbursts like “Oooooo My God !!!~ You beat google. Perfect SERP job you have done.” which can be good for a laugh and some positive reinforcement. Overall, SEOSerp.com is best left as a backup to double check your SERP rankings generated from WhatsMySerp and RankCheckerace.
Pros: Checks Google quickly
Cons: Only checks one keyword at a time, poor site design
Happy SERP Checking!
Matt Gonglach is a driving enthusiast and SEO consultant living outside of Atlanta, GA. His time spent off of the highways is spent writing for his radar detector and laser jammer information sites.