Choosing the best piece of SEO software to help watch your search engine rankings and website promotion efforts is a difficult task. There are a few main contenders in the field – Advanced Web Ranking, IBP and SEO Power Suite to name three, and besides the aforementioned there are a plethora of others vying for your attention.
Even if your budget is not at tight as mine, it is important to make sure you make the best decision when looking for SEO software for you or your business – if you are serious about online marketing you will be spending a lot of time using the software, so it has to work for you, and it must do what you want it to do.
During the past couple of days I have tested the software mentioned above, and after many hours, I have concluded that Advanced Web Ranking, coupled with Advanced Link Manager are the best pieces of software for me.
They are available in four levels – Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Server. The prices for each are $99, $199, $399 and $599 respectively. If you buy both, you can get the second (at the time of writing) bundled for half price, as long as they are at the same level. You can’t have the Standard edition of Advanced Web Ranking and the Professional edition of Advanced Link Manager.
During the testing process I have only had access to the 30 day trial versions of each piece of software. And what I liked most about the trial version of AWB was the ability to try the different levels. The edition I have been mostly testing is Professional, with that version you can export data from the program into one of the following formats: PDF, Excel, HTML, CSV, Text and XML. That, for me, is a real bonus.
Advanced Web Ranking
Keeping track of how a website is performing for the targeted keyword phrases is an important part of making a blog (or website) a success. Data crunching may have been far from your mind when you started your blog, but if you want it to succeed, you have to take notice of SEO and familiarize yourself with the techniques involved in getting a blog listed on search engines.
Advanced Web Ranking allows you to take a close look at data it would otherwise take you hours to manually collate, and once you have that data you can learn a lot from it. The interface is well laid out with multiple tabs for different tasks. If you are not sure what each tab does, you can find out by moving your mouse over the tab to enable the description.
Advanced Web Ranking allows you to create a ‘Project’ for each website or blog you run. You enter the URL you want to track, the keywords you want to watch and the search engines you care about (at the time of writing the constantly updated list of search engines is 2,000). You can use the big three or you can check country specific search engines, and you can have as many or as few as you like for each project. Generally I would recommend you use as few as possible.
Once you have the data, hit the run button and it will go off and do its work. The results can sometimes take a while to record, but that is a good thing as it seems more human like and is less likely to alert Google to automated queries (which it doesn’t like).
The website ranking reports are easy to read and show the keyword you entered, the page found for that keyword and the position in the search engines you are monitoring. I suggest you run the reports once a fortnight, or better yet, once a month, and schedule the task in Advanced Web Ranking so you don’t need to remember to set the reports running. When there is enough historical data you can track how the keywords have performed over time in easy on the eye graphical charts.
The standard edition is a good piece of software for people who have a few sites, but the edition I would recommend for most people is Professional. It provides a lot of great information and the cost is easily affordable if you take your network seriously. The keyword research tool is pretty neat and could be one of the main reasons for opting for the Enterprise version if your funds allow.
Standard features in Advanced Web Ranking
- Free email support
- 12 months free maintenance plan
- Runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
- Request new search engines to be added
- Monitor search engines that use Unicode characters
- Multiple language user interface
- Export URLs from projects to local files
- Import URLs from files or web pages
- Export keywords from projects to a local file
- Import keywords from Google Suggest
- Import keywords from a file and from the META tag of a website
- Import historical data from Web Position Gold
- Backup and Restore functionality
- Assign colors to keywords
- Assign colors to websites
- Column Selector
- Page markers in graphical charts
- Localized search in language and country
- Search engine updates within 48 hours
- Automated search engines definition updates
- Minimize bandwidth usage
- Functions from behind a firewall
- Keyword Generator
- Google Suggest integration
- WordTracker integration
- Use Yahoo API to search on Yahoo
- Use Google API to search on Google
- Monitor pay per click search engines
- Schedule project updates at the time and date of your choice
- Tracking the progress of your rankings over time
- Set performance settings for each search engine independently
- Friendly to Search Engines and their resources
- More than 1000 international and local search engines
Professional features in Advanced Web Ranking
(all the above plus…)
- Submit your website to search engines
- Multiple API Keys
- Event Logger
- Export Rank Evolution data to CSV
- Schedule backups for project data
- Schedule multiple project updates
- Schedule report creation
- Upload reports to your website
- Send compressed zip reports by email
- Send reports to multiple email addresses
- Save reports to a user specified folder
- Quick reports
- Local search for Google and Yahoo
- Customizable reports
- Create printable reports in multiple formats
Enterprise features in Advanced Web Ranking
(all the above plus…)
- Multiple proxy
- Proxy per project
- Google Page Rank
- Export rank data in XML and CSV
- Custom Filters
- Triggers
- User Profiles
- Project Manager
- Google Preview Tool
- Keyword Research Tool
Server features in Advanced Web Ranking
(all the above plus…)
- Advanced Web Ranking Server – allows multiple clients to connect remotely
Conclusion
Out of the three pieces of software I trialled I found Advanced Web Ranking the easiest to use when running reports to track search rankings. It was very easy to set up and ran quietly in the background while I got on with other tasks. The standard version is easily affordable and will suffice if you are happy monitoring your data within the program, but if you want to extract the data, you should look at the Professional edition at least.
Find out more
Advanced Web Ranking SEO software review
DISCLOSURE – For writing this review I received a free Enterprise license for Advanced Web Ranking. That has had no bearing on my opinion of it. I realised it was possible to get a free license for writing a review as I entered into the purchasing process – I was about to buy it.
Wow, what a great set of Tools. Also try this seo tool to monitor our website activities and website traffic details without adding any code to inside our website. I have tried it. You can also get it from here http://www.analyticsseo.com/
This really a great post. I like the way you made this review. Tracking your success in web marketing is really essential. You can learn where you have to exert more efforts and which strategies are really working for you. Thanks for this great post.
Hi Rommel,
Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to comment on my post. I am glad you enjoyed it and I hope to see here again soon.