Stop Paying $200/Month for Rank Tracking — Automate It with Apify in 30 Minutes

If you're tracking keyword rankings for a site or client, you've hit the same wall: rank trackers are expensive. SEMrush starts at $130/month. Ahrefs at $99. Moz at $99. But here's what those tools are actually doing: fetching Google HTML and parsing it. That's a solved engineering problem — and you can automate it yourself for about $1/month. I built this pipeline to track 47 keywords across 3 small client sites. It runs every Monday without me touching it and logs results to a Google Sheet. This article shows you exactly how to replicate it. The Real Pain You have a site. You want to know if it's ranking for 20–50 keywords. You don't need competitive intelligence dashboards or backlink graphs. You just need: "Where does my site show up for this query today?" Manual checking doesn't work. You forget. You get inconsistent results based on your location, login state, and device. After keyword #10, you stop doing it entirely. Scheduled automation fixes all three problems. What We're Buil