Up Your SEO Game with SEscout: "
As a web developer, a common request I get is, “I want my website to be number 1 on Google.” While this is an admirable goal, it’s a difficult one to attain for a few reasons- the competition you face for your particular keywords is a major one. An even bigger reason, however, is the ever changing landscape of search engine ranking algorithms, as well as the ever changing landscape of the Internet. Search Engine Optimization and Marketing is a full time job and there are lots of companies dedicated to it. Luckily, SEscout is a tool that aims to make the job of a Search Engine Optimizor, or really, any website owner, a lot easier.
SEscout Homepage
SEscout is a well designed, easy to use, and powerful search engine rank tracker (SERT). The best part- it’s web based (which they claim is the first of its kind)! SEscout allows you to add websites to track, and then keywords for each website so you can see how each keyword is performing. On top of that, they give you rankings for Google, Bing, Alexa, and charts and reports galore.
The Basics
Price Plans for SEscout
There are several different pricing structures, from Free to $99.97/month. The most notable difference in the packages is the amount of sites and keywords you can add. The free account will get you 10 sites and 10 keywords, and the most expensive account, Elite, will get you 1500 sites, and 1500 keywords. Other added features for the paid accounts include notifications, scheduled reports, white-label reports, and more.
I found this a bit strange, but the number of keywords is total, not per site. This means if you have the max number of sites on your account, you can only have 1 keyword per site.
When you sign up, you automatically get the free account, and you can upgrade once you get a feel for the app. However, the best way to feel for the app without waiting over the course of a week or two is through their free demo. In the demo, they list a couple of groups with a few major sites in each group. The demo will be the basis of this review.
Before we get to adding sites and keywords, I should mention Groups in SEscout. You have the ability to organize your sites into groups, or categories; in the event that you do have several dozens (or even hundreds) of sites, you can quickly find a particular one. While the demo has groups “Social” and “News,” I can easily see myself breaking my sites up into groups by personal sites and client sites, possibly even giving some clients their own groups based on the number of websites they have.
Adding a site and keywords is incredibly simple. Just click “Add URL” from the dashboard, add any number of domains (up to your limit) and press “Submit.” Adding keywords is just as easy. Select one of your sites, click, “add keyword” and add your list. Then, select the country you want those keywords to be associated with, and press “Submit.”
Add Keywords
Gathering Information
The main function of SEscout is to gather information on your domains and keywords- rankings, backlinks, traffic, etc.
Charting Information for a keyword
For each domain, SEscout tells you your PageRank, the number of Backlinks on the domain, the Alexa ranking, the domain’s all-time top ranking, and the biggest change in it’s ranking, starting from the day you add the domain to your dashboard.
For each keyword, it tells you the current ranking in Google and Bing relative to that domain, the change over the last day, week, and month for both search engines, and the amount of traffic that keyword garners overall for searches. Depending on what plan you have, this information is updated either hourly or daily.
SEscout also charts this data over weeks for both Google and Bing (when available). You can see how well your keywords rank your site, on a scale from your best search results ranking to your worst.
All of this information can be especially helpful to those in the SEO/SEM field who can use it to focus on certain keywords based on their performance.
Report Generation and Notifications
SEscout also gives you the ability to generate reports and receive notifications. For reporting, you can generate a PDF, CSV, or Email reports of the keyword information on a domain.
PDF Report
While the PDF and Email reports are basically screen captures of the SEscout website at on that particular day, the CSV info can be very useful for generating your own charts as they provide all of the keyword info on a domain for each day since you added that keyword. This is your best bet for tracking historical data and really running some nice analysis on your keywords.
If you’re using the free account, the reports will be branded by SEscout, but if you have a paid plan, you can have white label reporting- brand it however you’d like!
Another very nice perk about having a paid plan is getting notifications for changes in a keyword’s ranking. You can choose to have email or push notifications (to your PC, Mac, or iPhone) or both, with the ability to customize when you get those notifications.
Notification Options
The notification customizations are pretty nice- not only can you choose from any rank change (which they warn can get annoying), change to or from #1, or change to or from Google’s top 10, but you can choose specific ranks that you to be notified about. This is especially nice if we have websites that don’t rank in the top 10 for certain keywords.
For example, if your site is currently ranked 32 for a particular keyword, you can choose to be notified when it enters the top 30 or 20. You can change this as your website’s rank changes.
Conclusion
SEscout is an incredibly well designed, easy to use, powerful web app that can be a great tool for tracking and improving your search engine rank. My overall experience using it was a great one, and my only requests as far as features go would be:
- To add text notification for those of us who don’t have an iPhone but still want to get mobile notifications (actually, an Android app wouldn’t be too bad either
). - More historial data included in the PDF and Email Reports. If I want to give a client a month’s worth of data, I don’t want to have to get a PDF report sent to me every day.
I should also note that while the free account will give you a decent idea of how the app works, I think if you want to get any real mileage out of SEscout, you will need to pay for it. This might not necessarily be a bad thing if you’re in the business of SEO/SEM, as SEscout will probably do a good amount of heavy lifting for you.
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