Dave’s asked me to review Sistrix, quite a handy SEO tool, so here it goes.

The first thing you notice when you start using Sistrix is that it is translated from German, a few odds and ends are still in German, but this certainly doesn’t detract from the usability of the tool, it is quite obvious what everything means and it isn’t really a problem. If the team at Sistrix do want to make some improvements, changing the title tags to the correct language and double checking all their reports would be a great starting point – as some parts have obviously been missed.

Interesting…

I started off by checking out davidnaylor.co.uk, one interesting thing I found immediately was that Dave’s site ranks on page one for “seo marketing” – so within seconds I’d been giving some useful insight into how we could improve the David Naylor site, from the “Interesting Rankings” section. With this knowledge we could create an “seo marketing” page, were we so inclined, to increase our ranking for this key phrase.

Sadly it just crashed Firefox when I got to this point – it is also quite slow, both these problems need addressing as at the moment its the main reason putting me off using Sistrix (Dave also crashed on Chrome – it appears to be something to do with flash). Anyways, on to the next report:

PageRank Report

Next up I checked out the PageRank report – this is also very handy as it records this historical record of Page Rank for a domain, this can often be a problem if you can’t remember what PageRank a website used to be and you didn’t record it yourself. Dave’s site appears to have recently gone up to a PR 6 and dropped to a PR 5 twice, so it seems like he’s on the cusp of a PR 6.

Competitor Analysis

This is a great report for identifying your competitors – in this case its a bit up and down as Dave ranks for some obscure keywords completely unrelated to SEO, but we can pick out seobook.com and bigmouthmedia.com from below, which could be argued as competitors in the fact that the first is also a renowned SEO blog and the second is an SEO agency.

Keyword Opportunities

Looking at this report I found a couple of interesting things for Dave. First up, keyword tool, he’s currently position 12, so creating some kind of keyword tool would be worth doing maybe. Another one maybe worth targeting could be “search engine optimization uk”, were we to be so inclined. Here’s a few of the top ones, some are quite obscure in this case:

Backlink Data

The backlink data is pretty cool, I like the geographical origin of backlinks map, a very cool way of displaying how links are distributed across the World:

Custom Dashboards

The majority of reports have an option to add to dashboard, which we found quite refreshing as we’ve not seen it before in any SEO tools (as far as I can recall). Dave’s created a cool dashboard, check it out:

Overall, I was pretty impressed with Sistrix, a pretty cool tool – there were aspects that I didn’t play around with, they have a monitoring tool where you can add new projects (I imagine this is rank checking and link checking and such like) and an SEM tool. Highly recommended