AccuRanker Review: Why I Switched To This Rank Tracker

Do you know how well your site is ranking in Google for each of your main keywords?

If it’s more than a handful of keywords, then you already know that manually checking your rankings is quite tedious.

Plus it can turn into one of those obsessive, time-sucking activities that keep you from doing some actual useful work.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to use an automated rank tracking tool to track myrankings

It’s a huge time saver and well worth the investment.

I’ve tried many different ones over the years, but I’ve recently moved to a software called AccuRanker.

In this Accuranker review, I’m going to show you how this rank tracking tool works, and why I switched over to it.

Here’s what I’m going to cover:

• What Is AccuRanker
• Who Is AccuRanker For?
• What Are the Best Parts About AccuRanker?
• What Are The Annoying Things About AccuRanker?
• An Inside Look at AccuRanker
• AccuRanker Pricing
• Final Thoughts
• AccuRanker Pros and Cons

What Is AccuRanker?

AccuRanker, founded by Henrik Jørgensen and Christian Pedersen in 2013, is a rank tracking service that helps monitor the positions of your pages in Google (and other) search engines for various keywords.

While there are countless platforms on the market that perform the same task, many of these are restricted to infrequent updates and inaccurate reporting, especially with the rising costs of maintaining such a service.

If you haven’t guessed by the name of this one, AccuRanker’s unique selling proposition is real, accurate reporting — meaning your pages are actually in the positions stated at the time of checking, not just “thereabouts”.

Alongside accuracy, AccuRanker also offers fast, on-demand position updates, with the ability to refresh your positions multiple times a day for any number of keywords. This is arguably one of the biggest appeals of this platform, and something I personally use on a regular basis.

Who Is AccuRanker For?

Rank trackers provide valuable insight to anyone who relies on Google traffic to maintain their business.

While tools like Google Analytics tell you how much traffic you’re getting to specific pages, they tell you nothing about how these pages are performing relative to your competitors, and how much traffic potential is being left on the table.

A rank tracker is also essential when it comes to evaluating a sudden dip in organic traffic. Did your top-performing article drop down a few positions in Google or are fewer people searching for your keyword?

The only way to truly know the answer to these questions is by using something like AccuRanker to keep tabs on what’s happening in your business.

AccuRanker is aimed more towards Agencies and SEO Professionals which is reflected in its pricing plans.  Those on a budget or don’t need the rich feature set that AccuRanker offers may want to look for a cheaper alternative.

What Are Some Of My Favorite Things About AccuRanker?

Awesome thing #1: On-demand position updates

One of the biggest draws of AccuRanker (besides the obvious accurate ranking reports) is the on-demand updates.

AccuRanker automatically updates your positions on a daily basis, but you can force an update as frequently as every hour if you choose.

To do so, you only need to click the refresh icon next to a given keyword:

You can also select multiple keywords and refresh them in batches, as well as apply a refresh to your entire keyword database.

When doing this, your update request is added to a queue, so the time it takes to update can vary based on current demand. That being said, I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes to see changes take effect, even in larger batches.

If you’re making radical changes to your site or individual changes, this allows you to keep a close eye on your movements in the SERPs.

Awesome thing #2: Share of Voice

AccuRanker provides plenty of data-points when it comes to evaluating your keywords, positions, and competitors.

They also have a proprietary metric called “Share of Voice”, which can be seen from the main dashboard.

This is how AccuRanker defines the metric:

“All keywords that rank between positions 1 to 20 are used for the calculation. The average CTR for the position is multiplied by the search volume of each keyword, allowing you to see if high traffic keywords are losing or gaining ranks.”

In other words, it’s a quick visual indicator of how your site is doing based on a collection of your top keywords.

Interestingly, you can also add your competitors to see how much relative share you have for the same keywords.

Awesome thing #3: Time-stamping (notes)

When you’re making changes to a page, it’s hard to know if those changes will have a positive or negative impact in the SERPs.

Some SEO’s will make notes in Google Analytics, but a drop in traffic doesn’t always correlate with a drop in search rankings. After all, seasonality exists across a large variety of niches.

A better approach is to note those changes in your rank tracker, and AccuRanker offers a way to do this.

After making a note, you’ll see an icon in the keyword reporting to indicate exactly when that note was made.

You can also hover over the note to see what changes were made, giving you a much clearer picture of how those changes impacted rankings regardless of traffic.

What Are The Annoying Things About AccuRanker?

Annoying thing #1: Sometimes it detects the wrong page

Occasionally, when you add a keyword to AccuRanker, it will pick up an unintended page in the search engine results.

While this will still be one of your own pages, it won’t necessarily be optimized for that keyword which means you’ll almost rank lower for it. This can really throw off your perception of how well you’re performing for a given keyword.

By selecting a keyword, you can actually tell AccuRanker to change the page URL:

The problem? It doesn’t always work.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to change the URL multiple times across several days to force an update. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I don’t know if this is a bug or just some kind of conflict I’m not aware of, but it doesn’t make for a great experience either way.

Annoying thing #2: The same keywords are counted twice

Do you want to track Google rankings in multiple countries? How about across multiple devices?

While AccuRanker certainly allows you to track all this for a given keyword, it will count it as multiple keywords despite still being a single keyword.

This is somewhat understandable since it costs AccuRanker twice as much to check your keyword on both desktop and mobile, in the same way it would cost five times as much to check five different versions of Google.

For the end-user, however, this means dividing your package limits by as many times to get a more accurate ceiling on your plan.

For example, if you want to track 500 keywords, the 1,000 keyword plan should be more than adequate.

But you’ll need to 2x that quota if you want to track both desktop and mobile, and 4x it if you want to throw in another locale. When you run the numbers, the keywords start to add up real fast.

A Look Inside AccuRanker

Managing Groups & Domains

Before you start throwing keywords into this, you’ll need to go through a short setup process first.

Namely, creating groups and adding domains.

A group is optional, and it’s just a way to clump your keywords together for easy filtering and reporting for that group specifically. You can even have groups span multiple domains.

While groups are optional, you will need to add a domain before you can start adding keywords to your account.

This is primarily because AccuRanker—or any rank tracker, for that matter—needs to know what domain to look for in the search engine results before it can return a position for a given keyword.

Again, you can add as many domains as you want:

Adding a domain is a little more involved than setting up a group. But just a little.

Aside from entering your domain (duh), AccuRanker will ask for some additional information to help the software run better for each individual user.

This includes choosing which version (locale) of Google you want to track, along with which devices you want to target. This is also where you’ll assign a group — assuming you made one earlier.

Another interesting field here is the ‘Google Business Name’.

Unlike most other rank trackers that look exclusively at the classic top 10 Google results, AccuRanker can also track your position in the local pack, or what’s often referred to as the “map pack”.

Google doesn’t include links in these listings, but filling out your exact business name here will allow AccuRanker to pick it up regardless.

If you’re a brick and mortar business or you somehow managed to sneak yourself a Google Business Page (very naughty!) then this subtle but rather clever feature will be invaluable to you.

Now, the advanced options are hidden by default, but they include a few tweaks that may be important to you, such as including subdomains or only tracking exact match domains.

Finally, you’ll also have the opportunity to connect AccuRanker to your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts.

You don’t need to connect this, but doing so unlocks tailored keyword suggestions, as well as estimated visitors per keyword, and insights on landing pages and tag clouds. Totally worth it for a few seconds of work upfront.

Adding & Managing Keywords

Once you’ve set up any groups and added your domains, it’s time to start adding your keywords for tracking.

The simplest way to do this is to type your keyword directly into the keyword field, and you can even add or paste a list of practically any size (assuming it doesn’t exceed the limits of plan).

Some settings will be pre-filled based on your domain set up preferences, such as search engine locale and device tracking.

There’s also the keyword suggestions, and this works by plugging in a seed keyword to get various suggestions that include the same keyword.

I like this, but if you’ve already written a piece of content then you should know exactly what keyword you’re targeting. For that reason, I haven’t found a good use-case for this particular feature.

The other ways to add keywords are via a CSV import or using Search Console suggestions, providing you integrated your Google Search Console account during domain setup.

Personally, I find this a much more effective approach compared to AccuRanker’s “seed suggestions” because it’s based on the keywords your website is already ranking for.

AccuRanker grays out any keywords you’re already tracking, so you can quickly get an idea of what keywords you’ve overlooked.

By selecting those keywords, you can then click the import button to add multiple keywords to your account at once. If you have a large site and you don’t have a list of keywords to paste in, this is the next fastest way to set things up.

The only way this could be better is if AccuRanker automatically detected a new post on your site and prompted you to add a keyword for it. That’d be awesome.

As soon as your keywords are added, AccuRanker will automatically find the current position and display this data in a list format, along with various other data points:

The keyword table is essentially a spreadsheet, with each column being sortable and filterable as needed.

This interface is also customizable, so whether you prefer a cleaner look or you like to have as much on-screen data as possible, the table settings allow you to make this your own.

Some of these data points require Analytics integration, but doing so will give you insights into things like ‘Estimated Visitors and ‘Potential’.

Here’s how AccuRanker defines this:

“When a keyword has more monthly searches (popularity) than other keywords leading to the same URL (the landing page), the keyword can potentially pull in more users. The ‘potential’ figure is intended to be an indicator of which words to focus on when optimising.” 

One thing that rank trackers tend to struggle with is providing accurate search volume for keywords, and I was curious to see how AccuRanker’s estimations stack up with Ahrefs (which uses clickstream data).

So, I ran some of these keywords through Ahrefs.

The result? As expected, there were discrepancies between the numbers, especially for low search volume keywords.

For example, search volume for the “dotcomsecrets review” was halved in Ahrefs.

In any case, using a rank tracker for keyword research is far from ideal, so it’s always best to treat these numbers as a rough indicator.

Overall, the platform provides multiple ways to add, manage and organize your keywords. What more could you want?

Reporting Interface

At its core, AccuRanker is a reporting tool.

All other features aside, if a rank tracker can’t allow you to quickly and easily access the data you need, the way you need it… you’ve got yourself a dud.

So let’s start from the top. The keyword interface you saw earlier also happens to be the keyword reporting interface.

If you need an overview of your current rankings, this is where you go.

Fortunately, there’s a lot more you can do here to uncover more interesting data and deeper analytics.

For example, you can change the data range to compare current rankings to a date in the past, such as exactly one month ago:

The presets make this particularly easy, and I find myself using it all the time to identify keywords that have slowly slipped away.

The changes are represented with green or red arrows, along with how many positions it has shifted:

Pretty basic stuff, but it works very much as intended.

Digging deeper into individual keywords, you can click any keyword to open up the dedicated reporting interface.

The first thing you’ll notice is the Rank History report, which gives you a complete, day-by-day visual representation of how that specific page has moved over time — and this thing can get real bumpy.

And if you’ve previously entered competitor domains, you’ll also be able to overlay their page rankings to see how they shifted relative to you.

Scrolling further down, you can get even deeper insights about that page on specific days, including changes in CPC, estimated visitors, Share of Voice and also SERP features.

Finally, let’s talk about generating reports.

AccuRanker has an entire section of the platform dedicated to generating reports, allowing you to schedule automatic reports in various formats, straight to your inbox.

It even gives you a preview of the report. I chose PDF for this example but you can also generate CSV or Google Sheet reports.

If you run an agency or you manage rankings for clients, not only can you have this report sent to them on a regular basis, but you can customize the layout and branding to your heart’s content.

All you need to do is select which blocks to include and AccuRanker compiles a report based on your selections. It’s beautiful.

But this isn’t even my favorite way to share rankings with clients or team members. Instead, you can create a public report; a web-based version of the current rankings that updates in real-time.

When you run this report, it will generate a link that anyone (who has the link) can access:

The web-based report has everything you’d expect to see in a PDF or CSV report, and the layout is very similar to what you see in the main AccuRanker dashboard.

It even allows sorting, filtering and the ability to compare dates.

Honestly, I have a bookmark of my own public report and I sometimes find it easier to skip the login process and go straight to that. Yep, it’s THAT good.

Overall, this is some of the best reporting of any rank tracker on the market today, and I’ve tested my fair share.

AccuRanker Pricing

Honestly, the biggest reason why I switched to AccuRanker was that I was lucky enough to get in on an AppSumo deal awhile back.  It was 100 keywords for $39 and I bought 2 of them.  Now knowing their current pricing structure, I really regret not buying more!

Without this deal, AccuRanker pricing is based on the number of keywords you want to track.

It starts out at $79 a month for 1,000 keywords which works out to $0.79 per keyword.  If you want to track more keywords, then the price per keyword does drop a bit.  For example, tracking 10,000 keywords works out to be $0.39 per keyword.

Additionally, you can get a further 20% AccuRanker discount if you opt to pay yearly.

You do get a 14-day free trial to test out the product and there’s also a 14-day refund policy as well.

Final Thoughts

Although AccuRanker is a bit on the pricy side, I really like the features that it offers.  It’s easy to use, and I love the reporting and daily email reports I get.

If you’re just casually into SEO, you may not need to invest in a rank tracking tool like this.

But for someone like myself, where I’m trying to see where I rank for hundreds of keywords, a tool like AccuRanker is essential.  And it has become an integral part of my business.

Get Started With AccuRanker Today

AccuRanker Pros

• On-demand (batch) keyword position updates
• Easily add, remove, sort and filter keywords
• Keyword detection with Google Analytics and Search Console
• Built-in competitor tracking
• Proprietary Share of Voice metric to measure performance
• Timestamping to track specific page changes
• Ability to group keywords across multiple domains
• Various reporting options (including web-based reports)
• Strong library of integrations (including Zapier)
• Ability to create sub-accounts for delegation
• Excellent documentation and live chat support

AccuRanker Cons

• Occasionally associates the wrong page to a keyword
• A single keyword is counted multiple times (multiple locales and devices)
• One of the more expensive rank trackers (starts at 1,000 keywords to track)