Categories
Paid Tools Tools

Market Samurai – Rank Tracker Alternative

Sometimes you don’t know how much you like a tool until its gone. Although I’ve never been an affiliate for Market Samurai – I’ve used the tool on basically a weekly basis for years – I may have had it for about 3 years actually! 

I used it to track my rankings – and now changes to Google mean that they are going to probably start charging for ranking data, at the moment its only working it a limited format. 

If this is all news to you – then check out James’s post on Rank Tracking Software Other Than Market Samurai and Pat Flynn’s Interview with Market Samurai’s CEO

Bugger, as they say, in software development, what do I do? (Oh I could rant on about the changes in costs for Market Samurai- but frankly, even if I never use them again – I’ve had enormous value from them for a $97 payment some years ago – I have no problem with them – I understand the problem is Google not them, and I can’t fix Google!) 

But my issue is that I feel like I’m flying blind with no quick and easy way to check rankings – and worse –  I want a solution that I can use with a third-party website that I don’t control i.e. Wizzley. And double worse I’m aggressively testing new keywords at the moment! 

Sunset at Phuket

 

Eliminate the Expensive 

There are actually quite a few options out there – most of which are monthly payments, and some of which are VERY expensive. Monthly payments are the fastest way to financial misery that I know of – I am very, very loath to pay monthly unless there is absolutely no alternative.  

Eliminate the Very Cheap

Rank tracking is fundamental to my business. Its a pain to have to change software, I don’t want to be doing this every few months – the opportunity cost of swapping over is too high for me to be bothered with software I’ve never heard of, from developers I don’t know. 

Alternatives that I’ve Tried: 

I tried SEO Power Suite’s Rank Tracker – I’ve tried the software before and I know some sing its praises, its never done it for me. It took me several goes to download the software – the site seems quite often down which doesn’t fill me with confidence. Invariably their site freezes on my when clicking around when trying to find answers! 

Also I don’t like their rather less than transparent pricing – its not a one-off price -the first price only gives you “updates” for 6 months – after that you have to pay for a subscription. 

And I particularly don’t like how, when checking a few hundred keywords it got my IP banned from Google search, and wasn’t smart enough to wait and try again later automatically. 

I got the distinct impression that this software has a large user base, and hasn’t really been investing back into its tools to make them as good as they should be for the price. $99.75 plus after 6 months about another $48 to keep it going for another six months. 

[No affiliate link as I don’t really like it, and I hate Plimus as an affiliate manager – use James’s link if you are keen] 

Keyword Strategy as A Rank Checking Tool 

I already have an account with Keyword Strategy – so I decided to give it a long hard look. I dumped some of my Wizzley pages in, linked up Google Analytics and it did quite a lot of stuff very, very well. 

Keyword Strategy – What It Does Well 

  • it did NOT get me banned from Google search and it ran pretty fast; 
  • works well with any site that you use your own Google Analytics account with. I have several accounts on Wizzley and all of them combined and came across to my Keyword Strategy project very easily; UPDATE: Keyword Strategy will no longer work with Wizzley – see here for details
  • it was almost automated – because I already had some traffic to my wizzley pages – KS used the analytics data to pull over far more keywords than the ones I originally aimed to rank for; 
  • adding new pages and keywords is easy using the “import” feature; 
  • KS ads backlinks to your project based on visitors who have clicked through on your link – very useful, and a better option for identifying strong backlinks than the usual method of SEOMoz rankings or similar; 
  • its particularly suited for larger sites where you are into promoting a single page to rank for  keywords, 

What I Don’t Like About Keyword Strategy

  • you can’t use the same keywords on more than one page;
  • with a new page I like to closely monitor rankings for the first few days – however Keyword Strategy seems to have no mechanism for me to force an update on the rankings;
  • the pricing model is by website as I am regularly monitoring 20 odd websites – it wasn’t really a cost effective option, though I’m border line that if I had more control over the ranking checks that I may pay for the $100/month package. 
Keyword Strategy does a LOT more than just tracking rankings this isn’t a complete review – I’m just trying to sort out my current problem! 
Keyword Strategy is free for the first 30 days – pricing starts at $25/month for two sites – 10% off on-going if you click the <<EVIL AFFILIATE LINK HERE>> 

Traffic Travis as A Rank Checking Tool 

 This one’s been around for a long  time, its just I didn’t need another tool when Market Samurai was working.  Its a one off cost, and the free version runs forever (with limitations). One-off cost got my attention – so I downloaded it and started playing .

 What I Like About Traffic Travis 
  • Very good video instruction – its worth watching the videos first – it makes the tool easy to use first off; 
  • Quick – well it was until SEO Power Suite blocked my IP address – then it was smart enough to stop checking and say it would try again in a couple of hours (Power Suite just kept on trying). 
  • It was excellent for my niche sites – I added the url – told the tool to find all the pages on the site (which it did) – uploaded a list of exported keywords from Market Samurai and a few minutes later I had rankings. 
What I Don’t Like About Traffic Travis 
  • It couldn’t handle Wizzley – it just automatically tried to upload all of the site’s pages! Even when I told it to not do so and let me upload a limited sub-set of pages – it didn’t seem to be able to do that. 
  • It doesn’t allow me to monitor a mixture of sites in the same project – which is annoying – I like to manage my web2.0 sites in the same project as the main money site they are supporting. 
Traffic Travis is a one-time cost of $97,  the free version will work forever, but you are limited to 5 projects and 100 keywords per a project. 
<< EVIL AFFILIATE LINK HERE >>Note there is a heavy up-sell to Affiliorma membership site – I know little about this product and am not recommending it. 

 So at the moment I have a mixted solution – Traffic Travis for all my sites except web 2.0 sites. Keyword Strategy for web 2.0. Its not perfect though and I’m still missing functionality I got from Market Samurai. 

Anyone else got a better solution? 

14 replies on “Market Samurai – Rank Tracker Alternative”

Funnily enough, I’m actually thinking about moving over to MS from a cheapo alternative keyword analyser. I’m currently using Authority labs to check my rankings, which is reliable, but you wait over 24hrs for data, and it’s expensive. I do want to get away from a monthly model. I tried SEO Power Suite but couldn’t get on with it either!

Rankerizer – free, working great for me!

Micrositemasters.com – cheap, free for 10 kw’s, then $19/mth on the cheapest plan. Pretty decent but slow compared to rankerizer.

Also, if you use getclicky for analytics, it shows you your site’s SERP position for the person who clicked through to you – pretty cool 😉

Marketsamurai is a great tool, but check out “ahrefs.com”
its a tool for rank checking and keyword search with an other way.
You can check other sites with keyword and position in one step.

thanks for sharing your tips and this post.

great job!

Cool eh – one of those shots you just point and hope – couldn’t see a thing! West coast Thailand has some awesome sunsets!

Its quite hard choosing the right tool at a reasonable price yet effective. Actually still searching thats why i drop to your site :). Thanks for sharing and now I have some ideas.

Traffic Travis is a great free tool for rank checking! Tool I have used for a while! In fact I started with that and recently moved to Market Samurai. Good writeup on the different options.

Hey Lis. Ijust popped in to say hi and this one was a nice read. I’m with you on this.I’m using James Jones Microniche Finder for keyword tools and for keyword rankings I like SEMRush and a few others.. You’re right. Market Samurai is a sad loss and having them move to bing is just as sad really. The fact is that Bing isn’t going to cut it when Google is where the money is.

Also loved your bit on Pinterest. I’ve been using it just about since it started and I’m really liking what it’s doing. Social media proof is getting more and more important to us these days. One or two that you may not have seen that is doing big stuff for me and sending a nice piece of traffic out is RedGage and as a backup or a secondary to Twitter, I’m using Wooxie.com which is really, if it would get more notice, more full featured than Twitter because you can blog post and use three backlinks. Its a nice setup. Check them out.

As always impressive writing and great to spend some time on your site.
Happy Wednesday
Robbi.

ohmigosh. and THAT is what i get for writing a post at 1 am.. ” that ARE doing nice things for me..” and a few other little typo errors.. LOL feel free to correct those. Happy Wednesday and your writing is SUPER.. LOL you can delete this one..Just wanted to say a personal hi.
Robbi.

have been spending a while now looking for the right tool AND at a reasonable price, to fit my budget,thanks for giving me some brilliant ideas, glad i dropped by! will come back again soon for more!
take care

great info lis!
Just wanted to give you a heads up on a tool i started using recently. its called rankranger and ive been seeing some pretty cool stats and reports with it. thought you might want to give it a looksee.

i would say it would be better if we go for a Cloud based Rank tracker, because the major problem with all Window Based tool is they cant be used for large number of keywords, Remember Traffic loss is directly related to Drop in Keyword Ranking.

I personally use RankWatch.com (Cloud Based) & Rank Tracker

Comments are closed.