Are paid rank-tracking tools worthwhile for owners of one website or are Google's tools sufficient?

Short answer: No. Long answer: For a website owner with just one website (and not dealing with any clients), a free rank tracking tool like http://Rankerizer.com is sufficient. You can track unlimited keywords and the data output will be more than enough. The reason why paid rank-tracking tools still exist when there are free tools is because most of the paid options have reporting feature which is essential to SEO services for clients. A handful of them have client login feature which is even better like the one we are using now (http://Reporb.com) Other than that, stick with the free option like Rankerizer and GWMT.

Free tools are always nice to have but there are some things that you only get in a paid tool. And since there are specific things that are only in paid tools, they are definitely worth having. Take http://Siteoscope.com for example, it gives you updates on your keyword rankings and you can receive daily updates on any changes in rank. It also gives you insights on your competitor's rankings for those same keywords that you are tracking. That alone is a bonus of having a paid tool.

To add to Bonnie's excellent reply above, and to her list of paid rank tracking tools, STAT http://getSTAT.com does high-volume rank tracking for enterprise SEO. Some clients may have a single site, but it's a deep, often very large website. They track five thousand, ten thousand, even one hundred thousand plus keywords on a daily basis. Most of these folks will have a person or persons dedicated to mining the data and creating actionable insights on a day-to-day basis. So it's not just how many keywords you want to track, but also your bandwidth for disseminating and acting on the insights which will result in real, significant improvements to your site.

These tools are certainly worth your time, since you can't check Analytics or Webmaster Tools / Search Console for competitor-oriented data. Noise, Keyword Variations & Scope One issue you are faced with is the increasing 'noise' surrounding ranking data. Things like IP address, geographic location, browsing history and stored cookies all slightly impact what the user will see when performing certain searches on Google, so if you're thinking of searching for 'pure' or 'clean' ranking data - get that thought out of your head right now, it won't happen. So how do we combat noise? The answer is actually pretty simple. We use various keyword research tools, concatenation in Excel and other methods to build out HUGEkeyword lists of 10,000 keywords or more. Because we're choosing to aggregate so much data and so many keyword 'variants', the noise is lost in the scope of the endeavour. As Google moves more towards search entities (groups of keywords which all affect and impact each other) and away from a granular keyword-focused search-scape, it's important to track all the variations you possibly can. Proper Ranking Data and Keyword Research Doesn't Come Cheap Working with large keyword sets which you can later transmute into 'visibility' or estimated traffic metrics (leveraging the relationship between rankings, search volumes and CTR data) - your options are limited. But if you want to do something right, pay up! Decent data is rarely completely free. I've seen a few people comment that you should pick up Rankerizer, don't bother it's diabolical. Additionally, the proxy rotation/management feature of the tool is broken, and search queries will frequently 'spill out' onto your direct-line connection, risking temp bans for your business in terms of searching with Google (a pretty undesirable hindrance). Link Assistant Rank Tracker - Desktop Based A really good tool is "Rank Tracker", part of the SEO Power Suite by Link Assistant. It's probably the only desktop-based rank tracking tool that's worth your time if you're really serious about SEO. The tool is over £200 up-front, and you'll have to pay just over £100 per year in 'algorithm updates'. These costs reflect the Enterprise edition of the tool, which is the only one I'd go for. You'll also have to pay around $60 a month for some 'private' proxies to plug into the tool (which speed up the rank tracking and ensure you don't get Google-banned) - as well as around $10 per month in terms of Anti Captcha. This means the rolling cost of the tool is roughly £55 (GBP) per month - still with me so far? What you'll get is a tool that doesn't restrict you in terms of the number of keywords you can track, when you want to update your tracking (on-demand and scheduled are both supported), the number of sites you can create projects for or the number of competitors you can track. Great news right? If you're going to be paying monthly rolling costs you don't want to be restricted. The only downside to the tool is that whilst keywords aren't 'limited', you'll only be able to track between 30,000 and 40,000 keywords before the software starts to crash and fails to load projects. You can track more 'rankings' than this over time, but that's about the maximum in terms of keywords. You can get around this by editing your 32-bit Java to access more RAM (as 64-bit java does) but that can cause other issues and instabilities on your system... SERPWoo - Web Based SERPWoo is a web based rank tracking solution run by and awesome guy who realises that Rank Tracking software should primarily give as much value as possible in that specific area. Rather than providing other gimmicky features you won't use, SERPWoo is heavilyfocused on providing more rankings for more keywords, moreoften, more accurately for less money. Competitors like App.getstat and Linkdex are really falling short, to be honest. The credit-usage for those tools is really expensive which they try to justify by adding other features you won't really be using that often. If you're going for a web-based tool, get in contact with SERPWoo. They're good guys, they'll help you out and get all your campaigns running smoothly. Rank Tracker by Link Assistant is probably still more cost-effective, but may be more error prone and slightly less accurate (being a desktop tool). If you want to engage in some SERIOUS keyword research and rank-tracking, these are really your only two cost-effective choice. The rest? Leave them in the dust.

I think that paid rank checkers offer huge value. Most of the tools have added other functionality, that you can use when you optimize your site. Some also offer built in keyword analysiz, that helps you find new interesting keywords. I have tested a lot of them, and they are both accurate and easy. The cost is often low compared to the time I had to spend using a desktop version with proxies, or even tracking each keyword manually. Right now, I'm going with http://tinyrocketlab.com, which also offers a task management system, that makes it a lot easier to manage which keywords and phrases I have worked with, and which I have not yet had time to deal with. Most tools offer some kind of free trial, so check some of them, before you decide. Some other to concider are: raven tools serps.com gshiftlabs

Paid rank-tracking tools can't help your website improve in search results. They are solely designed to produce data related to keywords positioning in search engines. If you're the owner of one website and if you have some spare time on daily basis then I would recommend you not to go with paid rank-tracking tools since they pull together data only related to keywords positioning while checking keywords positioning manually will empower you analyzing the competition for the targeted keywords you wanted to get ranked on. Hope this helps!