Tracking Your SEO Efforts

Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to SEO, or if you’ve hired an SEO Specialist, you want to be able to see that your efforts (whether it be time and/or money), is paying off.  You want to see that you are indeed making improvements in the Search Engine Results Pages for your given keywords (as well as hopefully starting to rank for some additional keywords that you weren’t even intentionally targeting).  So how do you go about keeping tabs on such matters?

As with so many things in today’s internet world in general, and SEO in particular, there are loads of different ways to go about managing such a task.  Believe me; you’ll never be short of options for ways to go about gathering and sorting data on the internet!  There are many free options that are available to you, but they are manual and tedious.  You can also find some that are semi-automated that are either free or available for a very reasonable fee.  Then of course there are the professional level options that come with a more significant price tag, but depending on your goals and expectations, they may be worth every penny.

If you’re performing SEO for yourself and you’re only focused on one or two websites, more than likely there is no need to shell out any cash.  You should be able to get the information you need from a couple of great, free plugins for Firefox called SEO4Firefox and Rank Checker, both of which you can get from seobook.com.  In fact, even to this day as professional SEO Specialists, we still use this tool on a regular basis for quick peeks at website rankings, back links, PR etc.  It really is an invaluable tool, and at $0… you can’t beat it.

However… if you’re in the world of Professional SEO, regardless of which side of the coin you find yourself (the one charging for the coin or the one paying the coin for the service), you may well want something a bit more powerful and full-featured.  Something that is both easy to use and, perhaps more importantly, easy to decipher and understand.  This was exactly the situation we found ourselves in when we started to take on more clients and wanted to deliver superior service and results to them.

After doing a bit of research and trying out a few options, we decided to turn to Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon software for our search engine ranking workhorse.  We wanted the best not only for ourselves and managing our daily work, but to deliver clear, precise reporting to our clients.  And let me tell you, after working with the free tools for a while and then comparing what we had with what we deliver to our clients now… well, there simply is no comparison.

Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words (or is it a million???…)  In any case, let me show you our ‘then’ and ‘now’.

Let’s first look at the Rank Checker output that we used for ourselves and our clients ‘back then’.

While it gives you the information you’re looking for, it does so in the typical, dry, black and white spreadsheet formula that will quickly put many people to sleep when it comes to a keyword research tool outputs (or at the very least, is not going to inspire anyone to brag about the reports you deliver, even if your results are good).

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Now let’s take a look at just one of the reports we now generate automatically for our clients, with the choice of sharing it with them via a web page, a PDF or several other options.

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Need I say more?!?!  ;o)

Well, I’m going to say more, just because I love this software so much!

As you can see, you get a great visual representation of what’s going on with your keywords and what direction they’re headed over time, just from a quick glance.  So not only is it more appealing to look at, it’s more functionally relevant to quickly grasping what’s going on.  And isn’t that what you want to deliver to your clients? (or what you want your SEO to deliver to you if you’re the client?)

The beauty of this program (well, one of the many beauties), is that you can very easily set up multiple projects for multiple clients and automate the process of generating these reports on a regular basis.  Heck, you can even set it up so that the reports are automatically emailed to whomever you want!  How cool is that?

And if that isn’t enough, check this out; you can set up ‘triggers’ to notify you (or whomever) whenever a given criteria is met.  For example, if you want to receive a report whenever your site moves 5 or more places in the SERPs, you can set up that trigger/filter so that you get an email whenever that situation occurs.  Talk about keeping your fingers on the pulse of your business!

The example above is only looking at one website for rankings of multiple keywords.  However, you can easily integrate other websites to track (i.e. your top competitors), to keep a close eye on them and their rankings too if you want to.

While I am absolutely thrilled with this software, if I had one gripe it would be the training.  There is a lot of material and things are covered pretty well, I didn’t find it very intuitive.  In fact, I could see it being a bit intimidating at first for some.  These days it seems that video tutorials are pretty much the norm, and I think Advanced Web Ranking would do well to put some comprehensive videos together.  Personally, I like to ‘look over someone’s shoulder’ as they use an application to see how it works.  I can always go back and read the areas I need specific information on later.  I just think it would get people up and going more quickly and easily.

But, with that said, the effort that is required to get comfortable with this software is more than worth it.  Actually, you don’t even need to go through all of it before you can start utilizing it as you need.  There is a lot of power under that hood, and I don’t even think I’ve tapped into half of it yet, but I’m already thrilled with the performance.

Of course something this good and powerful is not going to be without a price tag (although you can get a fully functional, 30 day trial of the Enterprise edition for free).  The nice thing is that they offer it at multiple different price points so you should be able to find something that works within your budget.  But I have to imagine the chances of being willing to down-grade after your 30 days has got to be between slim and none (good marketing ploy, Caphyon).

Really, the choice is yours.  There are more and more people entering the world of SEO and Internet Marketing who are being pitched this product and that product as the be-all, end-all product for their needs.  This is NOT necessary for someone just getting started or who doesn’t have a lot of sites to manage.  But, if you’re serious about IM and SEO, and you have multiple sites of your own, much less trying to provide SEO services to paying, outside clients… you really should be willing and able to deliver something really good to them.  And as long as you know your SEO and you’re getting the kind of results your clients are paying you for, you might as well present them with a really nice, clear report to show off all your hard work (even if producing the really nice reports on a regular basis isn’t nearly as hard as it looks once you get everything set up right.  But that’s a secret we don’t need to share, right?)  Advanced Web Ranking from Caphyon will allow you to do just exactly that.