I decided to write a RankIQ review because frankly, I knew very little about it before I signed up.
This is my honest opinion of RankIQ as a two+ year blogger.
Everything written here is my own honest opinion after using the service.
In this review article, I’ll be going over the following:
- Why I signed up
- What it was like registering for RankIQ
- What I personally use RankIQ for
- Other offerings from RankIQ
- RankIQ vs the Competition
- RankIQ’s Facebook group information
- “Is it worth it?” and more…
Add any thoughts you have in the comments section below!
Here we go!
Why I Signed Up for RankIQ
Four months ago, I read a short snippet of a RankIQ review on another blogger’s income report.
Like mine, the blog wasn’t earning thousands of dollars a month. I tend to stay away from reading income reports that I feel are too good to be true. This income report sounded sincere and had a few snippets of the blog’s traffic in the last six months so I felt I could trust the writer.
Also like me, the owner of the website was penny pinching a bit when it came to expenses because she wasn’t earning very much from her website.
The one thing she did pay for every month was RankIQ.
Prior to reading the short income report, I hadn’t heard of RankIQ.
I had around 120 articles I had written. Of those, about 5 were ranking top 10 on Google search. I know that around 40 aren’t worth ranking because they consist of me sharing info on the blog or it’s an article that has too much competition with the big guys to ever come close to ranking top 10.
So that left around 50 or so articles that had the potential to do better.
I decided to take a chance and spend the $49 and give RankIQ a try. The fact that the other blogger was spending the $49 and she felt that it was worth the cost helped sway me to spend the cash.
Signing Up for RankIQ
Signing up for RankIQ was easy.
On the sign up page you’re asked for the following information:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Password
- Your website address
Once all of the above information is entered, you’re redirected to Stripe to begin checkout.
If you’d like, you can log in with Link (which I know zero about), pay with a credit card, or pay with your bank account.
Currently, RankIQ is offering $5 if you pay by linking your bank account, which I do not remember being offered four months ago when I signed up. However, I used a credit card and probably still would have even with the $5 dangling before me.
Getting Started With RankIQ
I found the website a little overwhelming at first.
I will say that my first impression was that it’s much more user friendly and basic compared to other SEO helper type pages I’ve been on.
I’m not an expert on anything website related. I taught myself everything I know about building a website over the past two years and I’m still far from being intermediate. I wouldn’t pay me to build anyone else’s website – I’d actually be shocked if you didn’t find a few errors rummaging through pages and articles here.
(That wasn’t an invitation to try to find all my errors.)
All of that being said, I like the simplicity of the RankIQ website.
I tried to start digging in without watching the video, although they firmly said I needed to watch the video. I tend to not follow instructions.
After about 10 minutes of being confused, I watched the video. I strongly suggest you bite the bullet and watch it.
I’m a very hands on learner so I needed to pause the video a few times and complete the steps on my own. This helped me learn to navigate RankIQ much easier.
I will say that even though I hate watching videos, the CEO’s voice (Brandon Gaille) is pleasant.
Updating Old Posts
This is the main function I use in Rank IQ. This single feature is what makes the $49 a month worth it to me.
I’m going to walk you through this feature with one of my own pages, as I feel that is the easiest way to explain the value that I’m receiving to you.
Let’s take my page: How to Host a Paint Birthday Party for Kids at Home. I wrote this article in 2024.
I’m hoping that when someone types in “paint birthday party” my article will pop up on Google in the top 10ish.
So I go over to RankIQ and type in ‘paint birthday party’ and run a report.
The report tells me the following information:
- Aim for a content target of B+ (I always try for A+)
- Write an article with at least 1,111 words
- There are 20 articles I’m competing with
- Time to Rank on these keywords: Very Fast (nice)
Ok so let’s now check to see how my article ranks.
My article is 9 out of 10. So there are 8 articles that are ranking higher than mine.
I click on Content Optimizer and enter in my article. I’ve got a A and more than 1,111 words.
Although I reached the content target and word count, I’m still not ranking top five, so I’m going to spend some time on this article and try to insert more of the keywords that RankIQ is suggesting I have.
That will take me approximately 20 minutes or so. Once I have an A+, I can move on to the next article.
Now I sit back and wait for my search position to improve, which it has shown to do with other articles I have done this with.
Picking a Title
I struggle with picking a title for all of my articles.
I have some random WordPress plugin that gives me a score on my title, but it doesn’t really help me with changing it to something better when I’m stuck.
Every time you run a report in RankIQ, you’ll see a section called “Title Analysis”.
Here you can put in what you think you want your title to be (or what it currently is) and see what score you’re getting.
RankIQ also gives a list of suggested words to use in your title, which helps me tremendously.
I put my title in for the Paint Party article I wrote and it received an A. When I simply put “Paint Party”, I received a C.
I will say that I entered the title of the #1 article on Google and it’s receiving a C in the title generator. 🤔 hmmm… Why are they beating me….
Keyword Library
When I’m stuck trying to figure out what I want to write about, I visit the Keyword Library in RankIQ.
On the Keyword Library page, you’ll see stated at the top “Here are the lowest-competition phrases with significant traffic potential“.
After that you can:
- Select your niche
- Search by one or more keywords
- Filter by competition
- Filter by time to rank (Ultra fast to average)
- Search by visits per year
- Exclude any keywords
- And more…
For example, I selected the Business: Workplace niche. I filtered by keyword “women”.
I received the following low-competition keywords: Challenges Women Face in the Workplace
It gets about 30,000 visits per year and time to rank is Fast. May be worth writing about. 🤔
What I Haven’t Tried
Oh there’s a lot I haven’t tried. I barely have time to write articles and I often fall behind.
Updating articles and helping me find keywords is all I’m interested in right now.
However, since this is a review article, let’s talk about all the other things that RankIQ offers that I’m not utilizing:
- Rankings Audit – I did look into this, but it’s not something I’m currently concentrating on. You can connect your site to Google Search Console and see if your pages have gone up or down. I’m sure there’s other stuff you can do too but it’s just not interesting to me right now.
- Content Planner – Eh, maybe someone else loves this, but I’m not interested in planning my content through RankIQ at the moment.
- Support – I haven’t needed any support, but there is a little Help button in the bottom right where you can ask questions or send a message. I typed in a question and a few relevant answers popped up.
- I will add here that it appears direct messages are only replied to during weekday business hours.
RankIQ Cost
The cost is $49 per month for 16 reports.
At first, I was pulling a ton of reports. Now I don’t ever pull sixteen and always have some reports leftover that weren’t used.
I found some older RankIQ review posts created by other bloggers where they say that there’s a $29 option for a lesser amount of reports. From what I can tell, this is no longer the case. I even tried to cancel and it did not give me the option to switch to a cheaper plan.
However, there are more expensive plans. 😅
List of all plans:
- $49 – Standard (16 reports per month)
- $99 – Pro (36 reports per month)
- $199 – Agency (80 reports per month)
Honestly, I don’t think I will ever upgrade. Like ever. There’s not enough time in the day for me to run that many reports and then go do something about the reports I’m reading.
I don’t just run a report to run a report….I actually take information from the report to update a post on my website, which usually takes me a few hours. I’m also slightly crazy when it comes to getting a post exactly how I want it.
RankIQ vs the Competition
I have a free Semrush account. I check my authority score on Semrush almost daily. If Semrush was $49 per month, I probably would have paid that a very long time ago.
If I were a website mastermind, I would probably feel like RankIQ was too basic and Semrush was the way to go.
I’m not a website mastermind. I write all my own articles from scratch.
RankIQ is perfect for me – the newish blogger that doesn’t want to spend much, but needs some help.
RankIQ Facebook Group
I’ve been taking a website Facebook break for some time now. I didn’t see much value coming from the platform so I decided to stop sharing my articles and posting.
Then one day a couple of weeks ago, I decided to write this and found that they have a private Facebook group that they encourage RankIQ members to join, so I requested access using my business Facebook profile.
It took about eight hours for the powers to be at RankIQ Facebook headquarters to approve my ask to be allowed into their private Facebook group.
This may not be the case for everyone, as I did ask to be added on a Sunday afternoon. I’m sure even the RankIQ Facebook people take a Sunday off.
I didn’t expect to write much in this section prior to joining the group. However, there’s some really valuable information on their Facebook page.
Honestly, I think there’s a $49 value in the Facebook group. Especially when you are new(ish) and trying to learn about SEO and what it means to drive traffic or build a website.
There are some great questions and honest answers in the group.
However, it’s not extremely active. You could probably get a lot out of it for a few days.
Plus, it’s nice having a group available if you want to ask questions without the world seeing.
Pros of RankIQ
Let’s get down to it and summarize all of the pros:
- Great for new bloggers and content creators.
- $49 compared to the competition is a fantastic deal.
- It has truly helped my SEO. I can really see a difference on search engines with the articles I’ve updated. They all slowly move up in rankings.
- It helps me write titles that I don’t want to change a day later.
- Keyword Library – Nice keyword research tool that you can filter by niche.
Cons of RankIQ
The cons, solely from my personal point of view:
- Not for large businesses or super savvy techy bloggers
- $49 per month. I know I put this under a “pro” as well. $49 is a lot for my little website. For those of us that aren’t making a ton off our websites, I see value in subscribing and then potentially unsubscribing for a few months and then getting back in as we continue to build our websites.
- It’s easier to navigate than what I’ve seen with the competition, but still a learning curve. I can’t stand watching training videos, but you really have to.
- I think the keyword database could contain more. Once I start filtering, I don’t get as many options as I’d like.
- RankIQ won’t help me locate broken links or any other errors with my website.
RankIQ Review Final Thoughts- Is it worth it?
100% worth the $49 as a newish blogger.
My website is 2+ years old, but I have a limited number of hours in the day and I’m still learning every day. I would not consider myself experienced by any means.
There are so many SEO tools out there. I’m not willing to pay $100+ a month.
$49 per month is pushing it for me and like I previously said, I will most likely stop using it for a few months to build up some articles. However, I would definitely want to sign up again once I have at least sixteen articles I can improve on.
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