It's been awhile since I've contributed to YOUmoz and I thought it was high time I started giving back to a fantastic community that's given so much to me. I guess the comments will tell if I get a warm re-welcome or a swift kick out the door.

This post was inspired by one of the most common issues I deal with on a weekly basis. Clients and prospects alike truly believe that they rank high in the SERPs before they really do. I've personally witnessed clients ranking low on page two of the Google SERPs who think they rank high on page one.

I know what you're thinking, "Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly!". Sure, most of us have realized for years that personalized search, location, and other factors have impacts on what you see in the SERPs, but I often find that even the most tech savvy of clients and prospects have no idea that this is happening. We cannot take this knowledge for granted.

Obviously there are many important metrics we help clients track, but I’d like to focus solely on rank-checking tools for just a moment:

I've begun to recommend some popular tools for rank-checking lately even before I notice this confusion from a client or prospect. My first inclination was to use our team of very savvy developers to conquer this task. Yes, we did come up with a few solutions that worked for awhile, but after being shut down by Google more than a few times, I realized that this was a complete waste of time and that our developers should be working on other tasks. Keep in mind that this was late in 2007. My first third party resource was Aaron Wall's Rank Checker for Firefox. This tool works great and I relied on it for some time. I really like it for doing quick research on the spot. Out of paranoia I always clear my cache and temporary files before using this tool. Fantastic product! The best part is that it's FREE!

It didn’t take long before I realized that I needed to keep track of rankings over time. With over 100 clients and growing, Aaron's Rank Checker was not practical and did not provide a history of rankings. My first thought was to ask all my fantastic Twitter followers what they thought. I had multiple people recommend Raven SEO Tools and was even fortunate enough to have Matt Mikulla visit my office for a one-on-one demo. The software is great, and it combined many popular SEO tools on top of the basic rank checking I was looking for. I signed up for Raven Tools and will continue to explore all it has to offer. They do offer an API by the way, which was another important factor in my hunt.

I was also contacted by the founder of AuthorityLabs.com, Chase Granberry, via Twitter. This software is exactly what I was looking for. It is simple, effective, extremely easy to use, and Chase has given me a high level of personal attention. What I like best about AuthorityLabs is that it is so simple that I could recommend it to all my clients without worrying about training them myself. My least tech savvy clients have been able to use AuthorityLabs with no problems. This software also charts your rankings over time and has an API.

The layout is straightforward, and it makes simple work of allowing clients (or your boss) to correlate important SEO milestones with their benefit. 

On September 27th and October 20th, there was a jump in rankings after some quality links were indexed, which helped improve their rankings. These tools effectively convey the time to ranking continuum without overcrowding the client or offering too many “extras” which can distract.

Not to be overlooked is the Rank Tracker from SEOmoz. (What kind of SEOmoz fan would I be if I didn't mention a tool of theirs?) This is a great tool, but I went with AuthorityLabs because my clients caught onto it a little bit quicker. Some of our clients have found SEOmoz’s Rank Tracker and other tools a little overwhelming, especially for most the less tech-savvy.

There you have it. Hopefully this simple YOUmoz post helps your and/or your clients. I would also like to hear of other rank checking software that I may have left out and feedback on my return to YOUmoz'n.