I’d never describe myself as a Search Engine Optimisation consultant. Whilst I understand the basics, and keep up with search industry news via Search Engine Land, SEOMoz and SEOBook, getting heavily into SEO is a full-time commitment and doesn’t play to my strengths.
My preference is to employ a rounded Inbound Marketing strategy, with SEO as a component of that. One key element to both SEO and inbound marketing is the requirement to monitor and measure your efforts.
That measurement can be done manually and is immensely time consuming. Nobody’s going to pay me to Google their keywords by hand over and over and nor would I want to.
That’s where tools like Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager by Caphyon come in. I’ve been working with the Enterprise version of these for about a month (there’s a free thirty day demo available for both of them and you choose which license level you want to test). Here’s a review of the two packages.
Advanced Web Ranking
Part one of your measurement begins with testing your search engine ranking. You start by creating a new project, defining the site you want to track and the keyword terms that you are targeting. There’s also a Keyword Research Tool (in the more expensive Enterprise edition) that will assist you with keyword research.
Keyword Research Tool, click to enlarge
The software then takes care of running those searches on the search engines of your choice (there are over 1000 to choose from, so if you’re targeting particular niches which have their own search engines, or foreign countries, AWR has you covered) until it finds your site, or has returned the number of results defined in your project settings.
Speaking of foreign countries, a very neat feature that you’ll appreciate if you’re based in country A but need to know where your site comes up when someone in country B does that search (as geo-specific differences in listings are becoming more common from the major search engines), you can use multiple proxies (again an Enterprise level feature) to check where your site ‘really’ shows up.
Even if the ability to run an update from a different country point of view isn’t important to you, if you’re heavily into SEO this feature is a god-send. A friend recently began to notice Google requiring a Captcha just to perform a search – the reason – someone at their location doing SEO work, running some other web rank checking software.
A big advantage of using software like Advanced Web Ranking is that you can schedule updates to your projects, there’s no need to be at the computer to run them, so you can schedule an update for overnight.
As important as gathering all this data is, being able to export it in multiple formats is equally important. AWR lets you get your data out in XML or CSV formats as well as providing a number of reports, which can optionally be scheduled and emailed too (Pro edition and above), so you can keep your boss/client up to date with the progress of your efforts.
If any of this kind of monitoring or website ranking measurement forms a part of your routine, automating it will free you up for more meaningful tasks that will make a difference to your search engine positions. In terms of which edition to go for, that’s down to your needs and budget but the time saved should come into your calculations too. Check the feature comparison page to see which one is right for you.
Advanced Link Manager
Advanced Link Manager is designed to save you time finding, managing and monitoring your incoming links.
Overall I spent less time with Advanced Link Manager, but its usefulness again lies in the time saved performing what would otherwise be tedious and repetitive work. One of its features don’t fit with the way I approach SEO – the assistance it gives you in automating the reciprocal linking process (link exchanges with other sites) strikes me as so 90s that I’d rather it wasn’t there. The uplift from a reciprocal link on a buried and overpopulated links page on a Pagerank 1 or 0 site is negligible and may even be viewed negatively. Building your external link profile properly is important. Automating it in the ways suggested by ALM tread a fine line that Google’s web spam team and others are inclined to move at any time.
That complaint aside, there’s plenty to like in Advanced Link Manager. As with AWR you start by creating a new project for your site, then you choose which search engines you will use to find sites that link to you. To save time you could also import a list of external pages that link to you without having to find them via search engines – useful for paid directory entries and the like.
Once the software has performed an update, finding sites/pages that link to you, each of these referrers is verified (i.e. not just checking that the search engine says the page links to you, but confirming that the pages really does). Now you’re ready to analyse your link popularity.
Referrers, click to enlarge
My main reasons for using ALM were to get an idea of the link profile for a client’s site when taking over from a more traditional SEO company: how many sites were linking to them, what kind of sites, whether the links were meaningful (in an article) or relatively useless (on a high-density, hidden, links page, and what link text was being used.
Advanced Link Manager gathered this information for me in about half an hour. I don’t want to think how long it would have taken manually.
As with Advanced Web Ranking, there are several different license levels and the comparison chart should help you decide which is right for you – features like multiple proxies are only likely to be useful for people doing a lot of SEO work, for multiple clients. If you’re looking for a tool to use in-house on your own company’s website, the Standard license will probably suffice.
Try them for free
If you’re still sitting on the fence, why not try either of these packages out for free? Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking both have 30 day trials.
