Once you get involved, SEO creates a lot of repetitive work and if you’re reading this you probably know what I’m 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 should To be ranked, search for long-tail keyword phrases and generate a report showing the current ranking of customers within Google South Africa’s local search domain (Google really dominates in our market).
All of this was managed through a mix of Excel spreadsheets, Google tools, Adobe, Word documents, and the like. It quickly became clear to us that with just 4 staff members we would be working around the clock to keep up. Signing our first deals put even more 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, going online, we evaluated a large number of free and trial versions of SEO tools covering rank checking, backlink analysis, keyword suggestions, and keyword efficiency indexing ( KEI). There are now good free tools out there, but putting all this together in one flexible, automated package isn’t free.
We settled on Link-Assistant’s SEO PowerSuite, it’s not cheap but it’s worth every dollar if you want to jump-start 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:
- Firstly, I have a complete (or rather the most complete) set of search engines internationally, essential for us in South Africa, with local versions of Google, Bing and our largest local search team, Ananzi, covered.
- The classification is really easy to set up; Once the target website and keywords are loaded, there are a lot of features available to fine-tune how the ranking report should run. One of the most important is managing the speed with which Rank Tracker generates automated queries to search engines; the human emulation setting allows the user to slow down the queries and the number of sequential events that are executed. If you’ve ever done large ranking reports, you know that the engines just block you.
- Once ranking is done, the search volumes for local engines and competitor pages can be simply loaded to give the KEI for each keyword; all loaded in a simple, clear and flexible report screen.
- Once the client has settled on the keywords and you have closed that deal, Rank Tracker will store the historical progress per keyword per search engine – a powerful tool for informing the client and flagging potential keyword issues.
- There’s 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 as a pdf with your company logo and contact details; all with one click (very cool!)
