I used to have a SerpRobot subscription but I stopped paying for it since I wasn’t really using it that much.
The other day I felt the need to track my primary keyword and found out that SerpRobot is still $5 but now you can track 75 keywords daily instead of 300.
I don’t know when the change from 300 to 75 took place but I bet that not many like it
While I was browsing Reddit in search of hosting for Ghost, a user recommended Pikapods, a hosting provider for open-source software.
I checked all the apps that Pikapods can host and found SerpBear, a rank tracker tool was among them and I decided to give it a try.
Table of Contents
PikaPods and SerpBear
You can host SerpBear anywhere you want but it could be a tedious process for those of us who are not into self-hosting our apps.
Pikapods make the process of hosting SerpBear a breeze, you don’t need to know anything about servers to host open-source apps with them.
If you want to give Pikapods a try, they will fund your account with $5 so you can test its platform.
Hosting SerpBear on Pikapods will cost you less than two dollars and you can track way more keywords that you would with SerpRobot.
If you don’t want to be too cheap you can assign more resources to it, I am currently spending $2.65 per month
If you don’t want to use a dummy URL for your SerpBear app, you can point your domain to Pikapods by adding a CNAME to your DNS records and you can have a custom domain to make everything even more professional and secure.
Since I use Cloudflare, I can secure the SerpTracker login page by creating custom firewall rules.
How Can this tracker be Free?
Few things in life are free, scraping the web definitely has a cost.
SerpBear is an open-source tool so you can get the software for free, but you need to have a scraping service API to check the positions of your site on the SERP’s
The good thing is that there are services such as scraping robot that let you make 5000 requests each month for free.
You can learn more about these and other integration by visiting SerpBear’s official documentation.
Should I Bother Using a Keyword Tracker?
Most serious publishers know that keyword trackers have their limitations.
- First of all, your posts rank for so many keywords and keyword variations, so tracking 100% of all keywords for all posts is not an impossible task but it is a pain in the butt.
- Secondly, tracking keyword across the different versions of Google search can be time-consuming and expensive
If you want that level of tracking, it is better if you learn how to master Google Search Console Data.
If you want to have a general idea of how your keywords are doing in the SERPs, you might want to focus on your primary keywords.
if your keyword research is legit, I bet all posts have been written with a primary keyword in mind.
Why aren’t People Promoting SerpBear Harder?
If you have been following influential people in the SEO, affiliate or display ads space, you know they are here to get richer and not necessarily to help people find affordable tools.
Having said, other keyword tracker tools out there have more features for more advanced players.
SerpRobot is a bit more faster than using the combination free open source software and a free API service and the user experience is better so I understand why people gravitates towards it.
Conclusion
I don’t think PikaPods is the best self-hosting app but if you just want to host SerpBear in it, you don’t need the app to have a 99.95 uptime and you don’t mind if the server is restarted every once in a while.
I think that SerpBear is all you need if you want to find out what pages are doing better or worse after a Google update.
Limit are not placed on your account so you can track as many keywords as you want per day as long as you don’t run out of scraping credits
