Choosing the Right SEO Tools – A Rank Tracker User Review, Part of SEO PowerSuite

April 3, 2021 0 Comments

Once you get into it SEO generates a lot of repetitive work and if you are reading this you probably know what I am talking about. As a start-up SEO operation in South Africa with a rapidly growing client base, we had established pretty good systems for finding potential clients, identifying what they should rank, search long-tail keyword phrases, and generate a report showing current customer rankings within Google South Africa’s local search domain (Google really dominates our market).

All of this was managed through a mix and match of Excel spreadsheets, Google tools, Adobe, Word documents, and the like. It quickly became clear to us that with only 4 staff members we would be working 24 hours a day to keep up. Signing our first deals put additional pressure on the customer service side with the need to generate ranking reports and track ranking history … the bread and butter of any SEO company.

So, hopping onto the web, we evaluated a host of free and trial versions of SEO tools that covered rank verification, return link analysis, keyword suggestions, and keyword efficiency indexing ( KEI). There are good free tools out there now, but putting all of this into a once flexible and automated package is not free.

We settled on Link-Assistant’s SEO PowerSuite, it’s not cheap but worth every dollar if you want to immediately boost improved workflow and efficiency. The package includes LinkAssistant, SEO SpyGlass, Website Audit and Rank Tracker. All the software is detailed on the website, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of Rank Tracker, which we use a lot:

  • First of all, I have a full (or rather the most comprehensive) set of search engines on an international level, essential for us in South Africa, with local versions of Google, Bing and our largest local search team, Ananzi, covered.
  • The classification is very easy to configure; Once the target website and keywords are loaded, there are a number of functions available to adjust how the ranking report should run. One of the most important is managing the rate at which Rank Tracker generates automated search engine queries; human emulation settings allow the user to slow down the queries and how many sequential events are executed. If you’ve ever run large ranking reports, you know that the engines are just blocking you.
  • Once the ranking is done, the search volumes for local engines and competing pages can simply be loaded to give the KEI for each keyword; all loaded into a simple, clear and flexible report screen.
  • Once the customer has settled on keywords and you’ve closed that deal, Rank Tracker will store historical progress by keyword by search engine, a powerful tool for informing the customer and pinpointing potential keyword issues.
  • There is a built-in keyword suggestion tool and easy ways to rerun reports for individual keywords on individual search engines.
  • Finally, all the accumulated information can be placed in a professionally formatted report and generated in pdf with your company logo and contact details; all with one click (great!)

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