Shoutout to the way I track keywords now (vs. last year's mess)

I used to keep all my keyword rankings in a Google Sheet and manually update it every Monday morning. Took me about 45 minutes per client and I kept forgetting to log in on holidays. (My New Year's resolution to be more disciplined lasted exactly 2 weeks.) Then I tried a free rank tracker tool in January that emails me the data every Sunday night. Now I just copy-paste it into a dashboard in about 10 minutes flat. Has anyone else found a faster way to track rankings without paying $50 a month?

3 comments

3 Comments

wells.evan7d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I feel this so hard. I used to do the exact same thing with a Google Sheet and it was just soul-crushing every Monday... especially when I'd forget to pull the data before a holiday weekend and then have to piece together two weeks of rankings. What finally clicked for me was setting up a simple python script that scrapes the free Google Search Console API and dumps it into a Google Data Studio dashboard I built once. It takes maybe 5 minutes to refresh now and the initial setup was just a weekend afternoon of watching YouTube tutorials. Definitely not the most technical solution but it works for my small client list and I haven't paid a dime for tracking in two years.

rowanw914d ago

Wait two years with zero cost? That's actually wild dude. Five minutes to refresh everything and you haven't paid a single cent the whole time. Meanwhile I'm out here paying 30 bucks a month for some basic rank tracker that still glitches out half the time. The holiday weekend thing hits way too close to home too, I had to reconstruct three weeks of data last summer because I took a spontaneous trip and forgot about everything. Really makes me question all these recurring charges I've been letting slide, especially with how simple you made that sound.

wadejenkins7d ago

I'd be careful with that python script though, one update breaks it and you're back to square one.