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).