If you have ever been involved or undertaken an SEO campaign in the past you’ll appreciate how difficult it sometimes is to manage and record the results and constant changes. As an SEO company ourselves we found the same problems, tracking position movements, backlink changes, hits to the site and general SEO checks. The difficulty came when we had to find a way of giving our clients an effective SEO Management Software or tool to help them manage and check on the status of the SEO campaign. So what we decided to do was create an In-house reporting tool especially developed by our own developers. This was an option for us, but I can appreciate it is not always an option for everyone so here I discuss why it might not be worth investing in that SEO package that does all this for you. In fact, it might be better to develop something a little more bespoke.
Why Would You Want To Manage Your SEO?
Well, let’s be honest here, that question is a little obvious to most people but to others it might not be as clear as to why. What if you are in a busy office or a sole trader who is doing SEO on the side contracted to someone else? Each month you get a report to see the positions, sometimes you would check in Google but they are often slightly different because of your personal settings. Now, for some this would be okay and efficient and just what they are after. On the other hand, it isn’t enough to just be told that you are number 4 for this keyword. We agree with that so that’s why as a business we built our own “SEO Live Loop” to display the results each customer gets and helps them track how the work is going. It also goes and crawls Google’s results to find the most accurate position it can, excluding any personalised settings so the data you get is as accurate as possible.
The image above is of our own unique portal which we built. That is just what we do for our clients, but enough about us!
Back to why you might want to manage your SEO work. Well, how do you know where the site ranks? I know what your answer might be, let me guess… Google it? I wouldn’t advise that, let’s face it, you have probably been doing that a number of times, you have probably been googling search terms you want your site to appear for or even your company’s name and clicked through to the site. The more you do that the more Google will know you like and value this site because you visit it so often. So, next time you come to do a search for a keyword your site might want to be ranking for… All of a sudden there is your site because Google has personalised your results. So, that’s a very good reason why you would want to be managing the SEO and tracking your positions.
Should I buy the Software?
Personally, if I ran a business website that relied heavily on SEO software I wouldn’t go out and buy one package that had all the bells and whistles on it. In fact, what I would actually do is go and get premium licenses for some useful tools out there that allow you to collect different kinds of data. I would go and look at things like SEM Rush, Copyscape, Majestic SEO maybe even SEO Moz. This way, you don’t limit yourself to one expensive tool and you get the advantage of having lots of different tools that target different things specifically. A better solution in the long run as many of these tools are adapting and updating to do similar things, some better then others, so it gives you a great starting platform for targeting and tracking your SEO campaigns. But a word of warning, don’t go buying all these premium licenses willy nilly, especially if you can trial the software first. Always try before you buy, it is much better to use it to see if the premium is really worth while because sometimes it just isn’t.
Inexperienced
If you feel that you do not have enough experience in SEO to warrant buying these packages then quite frankly, don’t. Some of these tools have so many different functions and abilities even I can find new ones I didn’t know about. If you are a confident, enthusiastic person then go ahead and dive in to try some of them. But if you aren’t, then your time is probably better spent learning more about SEO to better help you understand the tools when you come to use them. So, what to actually do in this scenario is go out and learn about SEO, speak to people who do it, consultants SEO companies, Google Webmasters tools and all sorts to help you get a grip on SEO before you go out and use these any sort of SEO management software.
