Alternatives to Advanced Web Ranking tool

[DHS_SH]

As an in-house SEO I personally use SEO Moz's rank checker on a daily basis to monitor website ranking movements (with my company shelling out the cash for it).

However I have a friend who is interested in investing in a ranking tool for use in her freelance activity. She doesnt have too many clients at this stage so cannot really afford a subscription service such as Moz, Raven's etc.

She is therefore after a tool that is does not require a monthly subscription. I recommended Advanced Web Ranking but I wondered if there were any alternatives to this?

The basic requirement is:

• Check rankings for multiple domains in UK for Google, Bing & Yahoo
• Basic ranking report (or the facility to export ranking data to spreadsheet)
• No monthly subscription, just a 1 off purchase
• Fairly cheap, I am talking around the £200 mark or less

Does anyone have any recommendations? I assured her that the Moz community would know doubt have some ideas (my experience is fairly limited outside of Moz & Raven)!

[matbennett]

Don't forget that AWR will require you to run proxies as well. These are not expensive, but are charged for monthly.

Rank tracking has got surprisingly complex of late. If you are doing it then you want to do it accurately and that means that someone has invested in the technology  - and that costs.  That does unfortunately mean that such solutions (particularly those allowing multiple domains) are likely to come with a fee of some description.

AWR is pretty good value if you are running a few domains. It's a good tool too.  If you are looking at other "buy and download to desktop" options definitely look for those you can use with proxies.  If you try to use them without proxies you'll find yourself blocked by google pretty quickly.

[DHS_SH]

Thanks Mat - I obviously wouldn't want to recommend something that runs the risk of being blocked by the search engines, so the use of proxy servers would be essential if AWR was to be used.

Is the use of proxies integrated into AWR? Do you know how much this would roughly cost?

[matbennett]

It's very easy to set them up.

Cost is dependent on how many IPs you use.  How many you need is dependent on how hard you are going to be hitting the search results.  However you can get 5 proxies from someone like trusted proxies for about £20/month. That's probably enough for a small agency running weekly rank checking or a freelancer running daily on a limited number of terms.  It all depends on how many searches you do.