Tracking keywords is a necessity of modern SEO.
We need to know accurately and quickly if the keywords we want to position are climbing positions in Google, if they have stagnated or if they have dropped.
If you are an SEO consultant , it will be very useful to have a tool that allows you to follow the keywords of the clients.
If you are a niche SEO you will want to know the status of your niches and if they are attracting traffic for the keywords that your niche focuses on.
In short, we all need to track keywords.
Almost all SEO tools today have their own keyword tracking. This makes things much easier, but sometimes the visualization of the data is somewhat cumbersome and this does not allow us to take action regarding our SEO strategy .
In this post I have analyzed 2 SEO tools that have powerful keyword tracking in order to decide: which keyword tracking should I use for my niches and projects with clients?
That was my mission and this is my adventure to discover it.
The 2 tools analyzed are:
Note: I know very well that there are many tools that do tracking: DinoRANK , SE Ranking , Ahrefs , SEMrush , but I wanted to focus on the ones that have spent their energies specializing specifically in tracking, not just offering it as an extra service but as one of its foundations.
Analysis conditions
Of course, to determine which is the best, it is necessary to establish some rules and categories.
These are the ones I consider most important.
UX: Question to answer: Which tool is easier to use and which is better designed?
Tracking: Within tracking we will see the percentage of success of the estimated search volume of each tool, the tracking speed and the tracking display.
We will also analyze their tracking panels and the options they provide.
Prices: Comparison of the plans according to their prices.
Other functionalities: We will see that apart from the keyword tracker they offer these tools within the plan since many will surely be looking to have more functionalities than keyword tracking.
Note: In order for the analysis to be as fair as possible, I have put the same keywords in each tool to see what estimated local and global volumes it yields.
Let's start with the comparison.
1.UX
For me, the UX or user experience is very, very important, especially because there are platforms that you fall in love with just by using them. For example, that's something that happens to me often with Ahrefs .
I am looking for a tool that is easy to use and very reliable.
A tool that, in the morning, with a cup of coffee by my side, allows me to clearly visualize the data I need to continue meeting my goals.
The NightWatch dashboard has really surprised me.
Clean, super clear and intended to help you by presenting on the one hand the most relevant data of the tracked website and on the other hand the changes in the positions of the keywords.
They even have a beautiful dark mode. Only Nightwatch has a dashboard apart from the dashboard with the keywords.
This allows:
- Quickly view the most important data and the current state of the web in a fast way.
- Parting the waters between web data and keyword tracking.
SERPWatcher is not far behind with a clean and neat dashboard to allow the correct visualization of the data. It has:
- A keyword performance dashboard (similar to the Ahrefs visibility ranking)
- The keywords that have gone up on one side and those that have gone down on the other (something I also look at DinoRANK on a daily basis ).
- A graph of estimated visits to the site.
- A summary of the positions that went up and down, as well as their distribution in the SERPs .
When choosing and after a few weeks testing the tools, in the UX section I prefer NightWatch.
Why? It has fewer distractions.
Although SERPWatcher offers more information, it also provides graphs and data that are not essential.
2. Keyword Tracking
The tracking itself is fluid in both tools.
Both have the possibility of:
- Discover new keywords
- Choose the search engine and the country in which you want to check the positions of your keywords.
- Track keywords on desktop or mobile.
- Alerts and reports.
- Possibility of organizing keywords with categories and labels.
Even SERPWatcher offers the possibility of sharing the tracking with a link (something that can be very useful for joint projects or agencies that manage clients).
Let's start by looking at the NightWatch Dashboard.
In the first section we see:
- Average position of the keywords being tracked and a graph that represents their evolution in the last 7 days.
- Visibility: indexed pages of the web, search visibility % and click potential (numbers that, from 1 to 100, indicate the visibility of your URLs for their queries as well as the potential for clicks that you can get).
- Distribution of keywords in the top 3, top 10, top 100 and that do not rank.
- Finally, a summary of the keywords that increased positions and those that fell (in my case 22 uploads and 0 downloads).
Later we have the second section, and at the end of the day the one that deals with following the position of the keywords.
I found it very interesting to show in the image that advanced filters can be executed to change this view in order to show the data that really interests you.
The default panel shows:
- keyword
- Current position for the chosen country
- Evolution over time
- Changes according to the chosen time period
- Local Estimated Volume
Note: We can also include other visualizations such as: CPC of the keyword, CTR and contrast it with data from the competitors that we want.
In the GIF we can see that the SERPWatcher dashboard is noticeably different than the Nightwatch dashboard.
Even the way of presenting the data is different.
Mangools uses two columns:
- The first column shows the keywords that we track.
- The second column offers general tracking data and if you click on one of the keywords in the first column, this second column becomes information relevant to the specific keyword.
If I have to choose, again I'll stick with Nightwatch .
In this case because I feel that your information is much clearer. It is no longer because of the UX distractions but because of how easy the tool is to use.
I also consider that SERPWatcher has more capacity to show useful graphs such as the historical volume of keywords.
3. Other features
Both tools bring with them other features that can be useful for SEO.
The SERPWatcher is just 1 of the 5 legs that make up the Mangools table.
The others are:
- SERPChecker: It allows you to visualize the difficulty of the keyword, the SERP's and other important data.
- KWFinder: The best known of its tools and one of the best for searching for keywords.
- SiteProfiler: Makes a general analysis of the SEO authority of a website and makes a strict comparison with its competitors.
- LinkMiner: Analyzes the link profile of a domain and helps (perhaps the best doing this) to analyze those backlinks. From here you can steal links and work interesting link building strategies.
It is clear that Mangools, in addition to its SERPWatcher, provides a variety of very important tools.
It is worth clarifying that the focus of Mangools is on the development of these tools and their improvement.
Nightwatch's focus on the other hand is on tracking, just that.
The good thing is that apart from tracking, as we already mentioned, it offers link tracking and one of its most useful features is its reports.
Finally a tool that makes reports simple and accurate.
Ideal for SEO agencies and for consultants who want to keep their clients up to date (needless to say, this report alone is not enough if you want to execute a good SEO strategy ).
Nightwatch also has a section to make notes and the possibility of carrying out web audits. In this sense, look at the basic data of the web and tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush can give you much more information.
Here Mangools clearly wins.
4. Prices of these keyword tracking tools
It's time to talk about the prices and plans of each of the tools.
Nightwatch is quite affordable than Mangools, but it is also true that it offers tracking of keywords, backlinks and little else.
Mangools on the other hand is a much more complete SEO tool and its price is not anything to write home about either.
Both, today, are part of my repertoire of tools that help me build niches.
So which one is better?
For me the answer is Nightwatch, now, if you are looking for an all-terrain tool, Mangools is ahead in every way.
And you? Have you already tried them?
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