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How much more does rank tracking cost when you go from 500 keywords to 1,000?
Summary
That depends almost entirely on the tool. On monthly billing, Moz Pro goes from $119 to $179, while Semrush jumps from $139 to $299 because nothing sits between its 500-keyword and 1,500-keyword plans. Ahrefs moves from Lite at $129 to Standard at $249, unless you buy extra keywords in blocks of 500 at a price its pricing page doesn't list. Tracking the same keyword in two cities can also double the count before you add a single new term.
Semrush goes 500, 1,500, 5,000
The SEO and Starter plans ($139 and $199 a month) both track 500 keywords, updated daily. Pro+ ($299) tracks 1,500 and Advanced ($549) tracks 5,000. Semrush sells extra users and reports as add-ons, but not extra keywords. Its help pages send you to the sales team if you need more than a plan allows.
In practice that means 501 keywords cost the same as 1,500, and 1,501 cost the same as 5,000.
Tracking by location or device appears on the pricing page from Pro+ upward. Semrush calls each location, device, language and search engine combination a target, and every keyword you add to a target counts against your limit again, even if another target already tracks it. Watching 500 keywords on both desktop and mobile uses 1,000 of Pro+'s 1,500.
Ahrefs goes 750, 2,000, 5,000, all weekly
Lite ($129) tracks 750 keywords, Standard ($249) tracks 2,000 and Advanced ($449) tracks 5,000. Every plan updates rankings once a week. The $29 Starter plan tracks only 50.
Ahrefs counts one keyword in one location in one project as one tracked keyword. Three keywords in two locations use six. Three hundred keywords in each of three cities come to 900, which is more than Lite holds. Keywords over the limit are frozen and stop updating. Ahrefs sells extra keywords in batches of 500, pay-as-you-go or prepaid through support, but gives no price for them on the pricing page.
Devices aren't part of that count. Mobile rankings are available on all plans for the keywords you already track.
Moz Pro adds 200 at a time
Standard ($99) includes 300 tracked keywords, Medium ($179) includes 1,500 and Large ($299) includes 3,000. Once you have a plan, each extra 200 keywords costs $20 a month.
So 500 keywords is Standard plus one block, $119. For 1,000 you'd need four blocks, which brings Standard to $179, exactly the price of Medium. Medium also comes with two users and ten tracked sites, so at 1,000 keywords the upgrade gives you more for the same money.
Moz updates rankings weekly and records only the top 20 positions. Anything lower shows as 21+.
At 100 keywords and at 3,000
The cheapest way to track 100 keywords is Moz Standard at $99, followed by Ahrefs Lite at $129 and Semrush SEO at $139. At 3,000 the order holds, with a wider gap: Moz Large at $299, Ahrefs Advanced at $449, Semrush Advanced at $549. Semrush is the only one of the three that updates daily, and the rank tracking guide works out what that frequency costs per keyword.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
- https://www.semrush.com/kb/32-position-tracking
- https://www.semrush.com/kb/692-multi-targeting
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1446270-how-are-tracked-keywords-calculated
- https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/2085043-how-to-see-your-mobile-rankings-on-rank-tracker
- https://moz.com/products/pro/pricing
- https://moz.com/help/moz-pro/rankings/overview
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.