2014 was a year of big changes for Sixth City Marketing. Our recent implementation of certain SEO tools has allowed us to spend less of our time collecting data for each account. We pride ourselves on the personalized attention we are able to give to our clients, and these tools have not detracted from that.
Rather than detaching us from our accounts, streamlining data collection is translating to more time spent reviewing the information these tools provide. Subsequently, we are better equipped to develop informed recommendations for our clients. It’s a win-win.
This post is a review of SERPS.com and Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. Have you used these tools? If not, we will discuss the benefits of each below.
SERPS.com – A Keyword Rank Tracker
We began using SERPs.com a few months ago as an alternative for RankChecker. Using RankChecker was tedious and the automated queries the tool sent kicked us off of Google one too many times. We also noticed a lot of discrepancy in the rankings.
We wanted something that would allow us to monitor a set of keywords for each client. Simple enough, right?
With SERPS.com, we got that and more. We can monitor keywords for each client, tagged with categories. There are graphs in the dashboard and a keyword view showing comprehensive ranking averages and statistics such as how many keywords remain in the top position over time. We export these statistics for use in monthly reports, but the tool comes with a customizable client-facing dashboard view as well.
Other things the tool does include testing and backlink reporting. We have also used a feature allowing us to export all ranking URLs to analyze page performance in content audits.
Overall, we would confidently recommend this tool for use in an agency setting. Plans are charged based on the volume of keywords you would like to track.
Read more about SERPs.com on their site.
Screaming Frog – Comprehensive Content Audits
Content audits are key to understanding site performance. These are like a blueprint of your, or your clients’, web properties.
As a new employee at Sixth City, I “came in during halftime” on many of our client accounts. To get caught up on what we had done so far and our tactics’ effects, I exported a lot of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools reports and tried to pair the results with historic keyword data.
Screaming Frog was the missing piece in this evaluation puzzle. I was able to get a comprehensive list of site assets, as viewed by Google. I could then see which pages we had optimized, which still needed some TLC, and which were probably not being found by Google at all.
The data the site crawler exports is customizable, but basic options include metadata content and length, backlinks, page status and external links on each page, just to name a few. The software also acts as an XML sitemap generator.
Screaming Frog’s SEO spider software is offered as a limited, free version, or licensed as an unlimited, customizable package for about $156 a year.
For more information on Screaming Frog and their SEO Spider software, visit their website.
