Ahh, the wonderful world of blogging and SEO. You were promised passive income, fun work and the possibility of working from home- or pretty much anywhere there's an internet connection.

For bloggers like myself (yourself?), success  invariably comes down to Google analytics. You can pour your soul into a post, only to watch day after day as its hits flatline. There’s nothing more depressing than seeing your product go not only unread but unseen; not even given a chance to shine for itself.

And when you have hundreds of posts, it can get...depressing.

When posts fail to gain traction, it can sometimes be hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. An uninspiring title, a poor pitch or even just bad timing can sink a post. More often than not though, there is someone out there who wants to read what you’ve written; they just haven’t found you yet by using search engines like Google.

If what you’ve written doesn’t appear in a search engine results, then nobody will read it, no matter how good it is. This took me years to learn, and as an amateur blogger I struggled to be heard simply because I wasn’t great at SEO. 

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is standard practice for professional writers, but this isn’t always something casual or amateur bloggers understand. This is especially true for creative writers, who make up the bulk of the emerging new generation of the blogosphere.

What is SEO?

Anyone coming from a digital marketing or copywriting background knows exactly what SEO is all about. By strategically using the right keywords, you can dramatically increase traffic to your content. Some basic technical elements like use of meta tags will immediately boost your readership, no matter what you’re writing about.

Learning how to do SEO for yourself is important for any writer in the post pandemic world, but it’s not easy to do it alone. It makes the transition from casual writer to professional blogger particularly difficult, and there’s always more to learn.

Even professional marketing agents get headaches over SEO. With more people than ever producing content online, however, SEO is more important today than ever.

Can SERP Tracking Tools Help?

To learn the ropes for myself, I bridged the transition to professional writer by relying on tools to help with SERP, or the tracking of search engine results pages. SERP tracking software can help you see the results of your SEO efforts, while also guiding you to improve your own practices. For writers, a good SEO SERP tool should show you what you aught to be doing to increase your reach, that way you learn as you use the tool.

How to Choose the Best SERP Tracking Tool

When looking for a SERP checker , you should keep an eye out for the most important features, such as daily rank tracking, analysis and recommendations. Ideally, you’ll also want something that can help you manage and customize the metadata of your piece, ensuring you use meta tags that compliment your keywords.

Some of these features, however, are usually not included in free SERP rank tracking tools , so serious writers will likely need to look for a premium option. Luckily, there are plenty of affordable premium SERP website position tracking tools for professionals.

Before committing to one of these options though, you might want to try out a free version to see what you’re in for. A free option won’t exactly be the best SERP tracker tool, but it’s better than doing it alone.

What’s The Best Free SERP Tool ?

While a premium tool is ideal, some of the free keyword tracking tools out there can be great, especially for casual writers still spreading their wings. WhatsMySerp is a very user-friendly SERP tracker that requires no downloads and can easily be used from their website.

It allows you to search for unlimited individual keywords, and track them in real time. 

The big downside to this tool is, however, the lack of deep dive data. Everything is simplified, and the tool won’t go out of its way to provide anything in terms of follow up reporting.

It's not exactly the best SERP tracking tool out there, but at least it'll help a little.

What’s the Best SERP Tracking Tool ?

Ideally, the best SERP tool should do more than just produce keyword hit numbers. Instead, what you want is a companion to assist with all aspects of SEO best practice. It also needs to be user friendly; which unfortunately, many ranking tracking tools are not.

For these reasons, for a while now my preferred option has been KeywordCaddy.

Unlike tools such as WhatsMySerp or SpySERP, KeywordCaddy actually helps with the entire writing process, from keywords to link monitoring and meta tags. As you write, KeywordCaddy will identify keywords and show you how many times you’ve used them, and what you’re still missing.

In fact, you can put together an entire list of keywords and input them all into KeywordCaddy, and it’ll help you slot them into your article. Even this review was written using KeywordCaddy, and includes around 50 keywords.

Along with keyword rank tracking, KeywordCaddy will also help you strategically place these keywords, such as by detecting whether you’ve used them in subtitles. This can be done by either working with the KeywordCaddy interface, or by importing a previously written piece.

When you import a document, KeywordCaddy will automatically check it for keywords, and give you information on which ones you’ve used, and which ones you still need to include. Anything that’s missing is clearly presented in the interface, making it much easier to guarantee you always have the right words lined up.

This is one of KeywordCaddy’s best features, and significantly cuts down on writing time. Before using KeywordCaddy, I would have to individually check every keyword, go back and look up search engine results , then do a double take to see where each instance appears in my work.

As any writer knows, this is an extremely tedious process, and editing can take longer than writing the draft itself!

Overall, I’ve reduced my editing time by around 70 percent or so. What used to take me an hour now requires maybe 15 minutes of my time at the end of the workday. So along with helping improve my SEO, KeywordCaddy has also freed up more of my time to focus on my passion for writing.

More Than Just a Serp Rank Tracking Tool?

When you first open the tool, you’ll find something that looks like a word processor souped up with SEO features. Just slot your keyword into the field to the side, and KeywordCaddy will display all instances of its use. After publication, KeywordCaddy continues its SERP monitoring, and will track how your content draws traffic to your site.

It’ll give you a breakdown based on hits from specific keywords, and show you which ones are pulling traffic, and which aren’t. This is one of KeywordCaddy’s best rank tracking features, though this keyword SERP tracking tool does more than just check keywords.

Along with being a great keyword SERP checker tool, KeywordCaddy also provides cloud hosting for all your projects, which includes an automatic save function. Projects are organized clearly, with the rank tracking feature easy to see, and other data clearly displayed for you to review at any time.

It also has cross platform functionality, and works just as well on your mobile as it does on a desktop. For travel writers like myself, this means I can update articles on the fly. Sometimes when I’d rather not whip out the laptop, I instead open KeywordCaddy on my phone and check SERP rank data or make post publication edits without missing a beat.

For these reasons, I’d consider KeywordCaddy the best rank tracker tool for bloggers and copywriters.

Support and Updates

Along with being a solid SERP ranking tool with a decent price tag, KeywordCaddy also gets points for its customer service. Their support team is very responsive, and has helped me each time I’ve run into challenges while using the tool.

Having said that, the learning curve itself isn’t too demanding, thanks to this SERP rank tracker ’s easy to use interface. Within an hour of opening the tool for the first time, I was having no problem finding my way around and getting the most out of it.

So while the first article or two took slightly longer than usual to complete, subsequent projects were smoother, and required much less preparation time.

The real benefits of KeywordCaddy come in the editing phase, however, when you can forget your keyword spreadsheets and just focus on writing.

Since I started using KeywordCaddy, the developers have regularly introduced new features, and I’m interested to see how the tool will be looking in another year or two. In the past year, they’ve introduced a useful keyword recurrence counter, which simply displays the number of uses of a each keyword in your text.

 A backlinks/external/ internal links tracking was also introduced earlier this year. Currently, they’re planning on releasing a new update within the 2 months or so which will include a grammar checker for keywords, and within the next year features such as a keyword research tool.

The former, the keyword research tool , will search for appropriate keywords for any given content, while the latter will automatically detect whether a keyword has been used appropriately. There are also some changes to further improve the interface, which already is pretty easy to make use of.

One of the last major updates already introduced a new dark interface mode, which is a little less strenuous on the eyes while working at night. It also looks a little more stylish than the standard interface mode, though admittedly that’s more of a personal preference.

Its ease of use and comprehensive approach to SEO make KeywordCaddy the best SERP tracking tool out there, and worth the time for bloggers and other writers to try out. Its position tracking feature is extremely useful. If you’d like to take it for a spin, they offer a five day free trial , which gets big points for not requiring a credit card.

If you choose to commit, there are a handful of different plans, ranging from basic deals which give access to most of the tool’s features, up to a premium level with extra support and an absurd amount of cloud storage space and keyword SERP tracking - no other tool comes close.

At the time of writing there's a lifetime, one off deal where you get absolutely everything, forever, for US$99.

Getting the best SERP keyword rank tracker for this price is a great deal, and will save you not only money, but stress.