Each and every web developer and in particular SEO Specialist needs to have killer tools to save time, help organize key processes and of course present clients with regular professional reports. Astral Web would love to present below an unbiased finding and review of Advanced Web Rankings Software by Caphyon according to important factors that Astral Web looks at in a web ranking software.
Advanced Web Ranking – Version Used: Enterprise 7.3 on Windows Vista
1. Setting Up a Project
AWR includes a tabbed design to setup your projects. Upon first installation of software, the setup is quite easy. Steps include:
a. choice of search engines – there is an extensive list of search engines although we only utilize the top 3 (google, yahoo and msn) and local search engines.
b. setup of website – includes a color matching to help projects with large number of clients (great!)
c. selection of keywords – also includes a suggest feature to help add additional keywords if you don’t have you definitive keywords prior to setup.
d. Save as project name
2. Usability and First time usage
Upon completion of save project process, a new window appears and web ranking begins. The keyword gathering seems to take quite awhile (11 minutes for 6 keywords for each search engine) to run but slowness is most likely due to imitating real searches and avoiding captcha and banned/unnatural results. you can tweak the requests numbers but if you do so, please be aware of Search engine blocking. For now we are not in any rush.
Once the initial web rankings process has complete, we started to take a look at the data. At first glance, the navigation was a bit difficult to find where and how to work with it, but after a few minutes, the overwhelming look and buttons were a thing of the past. (see advanced web ranking assistant button with question mark icon on top left hand corner for easier navigation beginning)
* top sites tab is a great feature to help with competitor analysis and running after competition links (later you can use the double linkdomain: commands with pairs of competition in yahoo to help out)
* sort out list of keywords by SE in keyword check in search engines box on left hand side
* filter box helps sort out long lists of keywords
* chart feature should be a bit more visually professional and customizable
Overall ease rating from 1-10 is a 7.5
3. Generating a Report
One of the most important features is pleasing our clients and representing our work in a professional manner is almost as important as providing results. Every company knows this.
Reporting offers quite some customization. While playing with the different file extensions, html seems to provide the cleanest interface to show the client, especially for clients that have long url’s the alignment of the table and cells fit best. Customization we have completed includes client logo and business information (address, url).
* note again that the graph functionality was not used as it does not prove well enough design to want to implement.
Scheduling reports – We have scheduled a weekly monday reporting system for ranking updates and report generation. Setting it up was easy and worked as expected. We are currently working on setting up a separate machine for rankings and testing purposes.
4. Local Search Engines
Throughout these last 2 years, we have received a large increase in local business optimization contacts and work.
We have setup a test campaign in Advanced Web Ranking and there seems to be an issue with the process. To begin with, we have setup our local search engine by city and selected the specific local search engine but once we have ran a report, the position, best and all other fields other than “rank” where not working and specified a non number (-).
This is a major drawback and needs to be fixed!
5. Additional
* we strongly recommend every user to go to the preference page under options, browse around and customize fields
* proxy server option is a great plus although we have not tested it yet
* Advanced Web Rankings also comes with a detailed user guide for some of
those thorough ones out there.
Summary:
Advanced Web Ranking Provides a Solid Web Ranking Software Package for small to medium web development SEO companies. Every Seo firm needs a solid software to help save time and send reports to clients and AWR is a solid piece of software. Although there are a few downsides to this software, we are glad to say that Advanced Web Ranking is a major thumbs up!
The only downsides that we hope for them to fix are:
a. adding side comments to reports (not mandatory)
b. graphs – Clients need to be shown the extra push in reports and AWR did not seem to bring that design to the table yet
c. a must fix in google local business search rankings process and reporting (see above #4)
We will continue to play around with the search engine ranking software and Keyword Research Tool and do recommend it to our partner seo firm.
