Searchmetrics – One Of The Best SEO Toolsets Out There
Yesterday we were lucky enough to have a demo of Searchmetrics with Kevin Thiele. Searchmetrics does a similar job to many of the other SEO tools out there, rank tracking, link checks, keywords, except it does it a lot, lot better and with a higher degree of accuracy (in my humble opinion). Here are a few of the tools we’ve had a play with.

Quick Analysis: Domain
Peformance Graph
This graph seems to be similar to our visibility graph, where we measure search volumes and positions and give a higher weighting the higher position, multiplying it by the search volume – although this hasn’t been confirmed, it looks quite likely and it’s certainly useful to measure overall progress.
Interesting Rankings
Below this performance graph it has a section called “interesting rankings” – which gives you a load of popular keywords and the rankings – pre-populated! It highlights the ones on page 1 in green, page 2 in yellow and anything outside page 2 just has a white background. It has position, estimated traffic it is likely to be getting at that position and what potential traffic it could get, also with average cost per click added on the end – which is handy if you want to target expensive terms only.1
This is pretty good considering we’re getting back a list of keywords, with rankings, and we only just added it – I’ve tried it with a number of websites and it is very useful.
We’re yet to try out the more advanced features as we need to get our Google Analytics accounts integrated and a few other things…
Domain Cockpit
In the overview of domain cockpit you can compare two websites performance in the search engines – getting what I believe to be some kind of visibility score (based on ranking and keyword volume). It’s great for comparing your client’s site against competitors, handy when you’ve taken a tumble and can show that everyone else has too, or even better, when you’ve gone up but the competition has remained static (as in the example below).
Competitor Research
It really is good for competitor research, we’ve taken a look at SEO Gadget, and as you can see if you compare Richard’s keywords with Dave’s you get some interesting insight.
Looking at the graph comparing the performance we can see Dave gets a lot more coverage in the search engines…
However when you take a look at the keywords below and compare them to Dave’s above you can see that Richard is doing a much better job at getting his site to rank for SEO related keywords, unlike Dave who ranks for a number of random keywords such as “porn site” and splitscreen.

Which is the best type of SEO? Massive coverage, or targeting highly relevant keywords.
Agency vs In-House
Looking at their pricing structure, we think that currently it is ideal for In-House SEO’s working for larger companies such as PLCs. As for agencies, currently their pricing system would take a chunk out of each of our contracts, rather than paying per domain per month it would be nice if they had a fixed price for agencies or for industry sectors (similar to Hitwise).
14 Comments
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
Looks good from what I’ve read and seen here, my only gripe with a lot of the SEO tools out there, be it cloud or desktop apps is that they over complicate things by adding some many extra features all over the place. Gone the days when a noob could use a tool and know what’s going on, a really good understanding of SEO is required to run these applications properly.
Or am I mad? ๐
David Whitehouse
Chris M – I think thats a fair point, but I think if you really want to save time/money or improve your effectiveness with SEO tools you need to take the time to learn how to use them.
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
@DavidW – I can’t disagree with you on that at all. I just find that as these applications grow, they go from simple applications to incredibly advanced ones and if you weren’t there to go on the journey, then you have a huge amount of work to do to become familiar with the software to a point where it really works for you. That said, I do agree that you need to master something to do it properly, just figured I’d throw my opinion out there and see what you gents thought ๐
@DavidN – I’ve been practicing SEO for about 6 years, so I’m definitely keen to have a good look at SearchMetrics as from what I can tell, it looks hugely impressive. I’ve been using WebCEO for a couple years for some of the features which save me time and have enjoyed it, but I feel it might be time to explore something new and because you gents have mentioned it here, I see it as a credible source.
David Whitehouse
Yeah that is very true – it can be a bit daunting trying something when its already been created – I can imagine AdWords is a nightmare if I just started using it now!
Also – I can see you are using the reply button, which it appears I still haven’t mastered LOL
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
Hehe, good old reply buttons, you never know what WordPress is going to do with the comment ๐
AdWords.. sheesh, I used it many moons ago, then concentrated completely on SEO and only revisited SEM recently and I have literally no clue what’s cracking in AdWords anymore, everything’s completely different, haha. I’ve been trying to find a great guide to AdWords so that I could come up to speed again on setting up campaigns, groups and so forth without having to spend hours exploring, but that’s a whole new topic!
David Whitehouse
Chris – Remarketing is definitely worth checking out: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-remarketing.html
David Naylor
Chris your not mad, but searchmetrics as a very easy to use Interface and an advance switch so you should be happy
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
Sorry David, replied to you inline above ๐
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
Looks like we reached the max number of replies, lol. I wonder how I missed that article, I’ve been reading this site for a long time! End of Nov, I was probably overloaded with work ๐
Thanks for the link, let me explore it ๐
Dan - http://www.danieldeceuster.com
Dave, just started reading your blog a couple months ago, first time commenter. I really like following your posts and advice and find your blog very helpful. I had heard of Searchmetrics in the past, but never saw screen shots so this was great to see. I have a request if you could do it that would be really, really helpful.
Can we see a comparison of different SEO tools that exist out there and get your recommendations on what you think is the easiest to use, most effective, etc.? There’s Raven, SEOmoz, Searchmetrics, Ontolo and others I keep hearing about but just don’t know which ones to try or if they are all just the same. I really don’t have time to demo a bunch of software to see what works.
Maybe you have already tried them all? If so, any recommendations? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Rene - http://wpwebshop.com
Nice post, Searchmetrics looks a bit similar to RankTracker, which also has the option to compare with several competitors and you can see which keywords has volume. The downside of RT is that besides the initial purchase price you also have to pay a monthly fee. Do you know the price of Searchmetrics, and is it a one-time fee or also monthly recurring ?
SugarFree - http://www.sugarfreemedia.co.uk
Interesting article! There are a growing number of tools out in the ether that handle some part of the SEO experience, but not too many that are, for want of a better word, one stop shops. This tool looks interesting, but as you comment the pricing will probably put it out of reach of most agencies.
Jeremy - Referencement - http://www.indexwebmarketing.com/services/referencement
Looks amazing but expensive ๐
Will take a look when budget permits ๐
Genite - http://www.genite.com/
Great, Search Metrics looks as similar to Rank Tracker, So you can easily compare several competitors and help you to see which keywords has how much volume.