Revisiting our SEO Software
In the hope that this post may prove useful to other people who work in search engine marketing, or for those looking to get started with their own business’s SEO efforts, we have decided to revisit a earlier post about two particular SEO tools, Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager by Caphyon. Please note that Caphyon have been kind enough to extend our licence for providing a write-up on our experiences with the software, though we have been paying licensees’ of the software previously.
To anyone who may be unfamiliar with the software, both offer a number of features that will help you better understand your presence online and particularly when it comes to the major search engines. Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) providers a number of SEO tools, first and foremost being a search engine rank checker. Advanced Link Manager (ALM) is a very handy tool that will allow you to locate potential link opportunities for your content as well as finding the websites that may be sending your competitors traffic.
We have tested a number of tools when it comes to our search engine marketing work, and even moved away from AWR and ALM for a short period over the past 12 months. Over this time we tested out Raven SEO, partly because it integrated with social media and Google Adwords. We decided to move back to using AWR and ALM for a few reasons, including the continued development of the software with new functionality, but also because when it comes down to it, we always seemed to use it more than any other tool that it competes with, and ultimately that is what you want from any software that you use.
A key feature with any SEO software is that it provides you with actionable data that helps you build your online presence. Ultimately this means that you engage with more people online, and drive increasing traffic through to your online properties. With that it was great to see Caphyon work to integrate Google Analytics data into Advanced Web Ranking because whilst it may be great to rank highly for particular keywords, success will come from ranking highly for those keywords that actually drive you traffic. In this same area, I have always loved the simplicity of AWR for tracking competitors as well, and being able to easily mould data to how I want in terms of tracking website visbility, rank changes and more across multiple search engines and geographies. Add to this the option to export data into various customisable reports and you really have a powerful package that at the same time can easily be adopted by newcomers. Another major release for the software was the addition of Linkscape metrics from SEOmoz, giving you an integrated link building tool within AWR for the first time. AWR also integrates keyword research tools however I do find I use these less than other functions, preferring to individually use web-based tools such as Adwords and KeywordSpy.
Advanced Link Manager is a great competitive analysis tool for researching who is linking through to your competitors online. Where it shines though outside of a simple link research tool, is in the information it can supply you on both your own website and your competitors from both an on- and off-site optimisation perspective. ALM allows you to run optimisation reports that will compare your website to the top ten results within a search engine for a given keyword and report back on data such as domain and page authority, content and page analysis. As with AWR, Advanced Link Manager features an integration with SEOmoz that will let you pull in up to 10,000 links tracked by SEOmoz and monitor them in ALM. A recent addition to ALM is the ability to track results from Google Maps for business listings, a hugely important function for businesses looking to drive local awareness and sales from local search results. Much like AWR, Advanced Link Manager packs in a lot of information and you will find that you can really get stuck in to using the software with the sheer wealth of options and data. It’s ability to let you crunch down on specific information, particularly when it comes down to link research, and finding those sites where you can expand your audience will prove invaluable to any business.
A lot of people are enamoured with cloud services at the moment and some may be put off by the notion of using desktop software in this case. We are big advocates of the benefit of the cloud, where it provides an advantage, and when it comes to our seo tools of choice, we have found that Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager are far and away ahead of a lot of tools on the market. If you haven’t checked them out already, I’d recommend heading over to Caphyon and reading up on both applications and trialling them to see if they fit with your own needs and requirements.
