As an SEO company (Search Engine Optimization), who also does web design and hosting, one of our jobs is to get our client's site up in search engine rankings.  Of course, our ultimate goal is to get them to number one spot in every search engine, but, of course, this is a long process, and, depending on the keywords the client selects, it can be very difficult.

Some keywords have enormous competition, even if they have a great deal of organic searches.  Organic searches are those which are considered “free” as opposed to the sponsored ads you see either above or to the right of the organic listings.  These are PPC or Pay per click ads.  PPC can be very successful done correctly, or break your bank if done incorrectly.  We have run PPC campaigns, but tend to focus on increasing website ranking in the organic searches for our clients.

When we are working in SEO, there are a lot of factors to think about.  Firstly, there is the choice of key words or keyword phrases.  These are what we work out with our clients as our best take on what people are searching for.  Choosing keywords and phrases is not a random, haphazard process.  Careful thought needs to go into deciding where we place our effort.  Sometimes a phrase with a high search volume receives less effort, because of the amount of competition, than one with a lesser volume.  The amount of searches versus the competition is called the KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index.  The formula for KEI is Searches * Searches / Number of results.  The higher the KEI, the easier it will be to get to the top.  Using the world's greatest computer, the human brain, is where we start, but a good keyword research tool is also a must.

In the early days of SEO, all the work of figuring out keywords was done manually and was very time consuming work.  Whilst we still tend to brainstorm initial search phrases and words with our clients to get the ball rolling, after that initial manual work, we move to more automated, software based methods to speed up the process.  Not only that, but, with a computer thinking for you, many more keyword and key phrase options can be searched and found, and analysed.  It’s not about cheating on the game, it’s about working our SEO smarter, and with better benefits, for our clients.

Once we’ve found our keywords and phrases, then worked them into our client’s site in various articles, titles and headers, we need to know what effect, up or down, these changes or additions are making.  Blind changes and tweaks can be, and usually are, a waste of time and effort.  Like with any form of marketing, measure, measure and measure again is the key.  Or, more correctly, in SEO terms, monitor, monitor, and monitor some more!  And tweak accordingly.

However, monitoring a site, let alone hundreds of sites and clients, is an enormous task if you tackle it using only manual muscle.  An average site may have, say, 10 keywords.  You want to keep track of each site in 3 search engines, and you have 100 sites.  10 x 3 x 100 = 3000.  If you want to track these every month, that’s 3000 inquiries you would have to do, each and every month.  That’s a lot of work!  Extremely important work, granted, but a lot of work.

We sometimes hear other SEO professionals saying that SEO isn’t always an ongoing process.  We disagree.  There are times where one hit of good SEO to a site can propel it to the top, but this is generally only because competitors haven’t had decent SEO done.  As long as the competitors never do more than you, SEO COULD be one time.  Unfortunately, companies are now waking up (or did a long time back) to the necessity of good, ongoing SEO, and one time fixes won’t usually last long.  So, there has to be a better way than running all those queries manually, and there is!

Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager are two tools which, on their own, save us hours of work each month.  As a company, we take what we do very seriously and look to give our clients the best service and feedback possible.  And, with the way we have structured our affordable web design packages, we can’t afford to be wasting time.  AWR and ALM help us get right down to business and deliver a comprehensive product to our clients.

When we kick off a design for a client, we constantly think of SEO as we build.  No sense in doing it twice!  But, being human, we just can’t grab every linking opportunity.  Once the site is up and running we use Advanced Link Manager to discover potential linking opportunities we may have missed, and analyse each one to determine how much time we will spend pursuing it.  There’s no point in spending hours chasing a PR1, when there are PR4 or 5’s begging!  And ALM is automate-able.  That’s what we really like about both ALM and AWR – set a schedule and forget them.  Get on with other important work while they do THEIR important work in the background.  It’s almost like having another staff member!

Advanced Link Manager has really cut down the time we spend on link building.  Even though we used other tools before, there was always one area that was lacking.  As I mentioned above, ALM can automate link building, including checking link popularity.  Checking a site's popularity with ALM is a breeze and let's us focus our efforts on targeting quality links, rather than quantity with the hope that some are good.  Another great feature is the way the requests are sent to the search engines.  Because they look like human requests we get accurate data - obviously a very important thing for any link building campaign.

For us, ALM is the ultimate "extra human" link manager.  The "Website Crawler" analyzes Google and Yahoo sitemaps and brings back data for us.  We can analyze competitor's site to see why they are doing well, giving us opportunities to upgrade our sites.  And one of the biggies for us, was how ALM keeps track of complicated link referral campaigns.  No more post it notes or fighting with databases!  ALM does it quickly, easily and painlessly.

At the same time that ALM is ferreting out potential links, we have Advanced Web Ranking sniffing out overlooked keywords.  We used to use a host of other tools all of which took time.  No more… one tool (well 2 really I guess!) to rule them all!  It will even go and grab keywords for other websites!  No more guessing what your competitors are optimizing for – awesome! Once we’re done our optimization and link building, we want to know what’s happening with our sites.  Monitor, monitor and monitor more!  Advanced Web Ranking is the tool we rely on.  Like ALM, we can schedule reports at set intervals.  Better still, it can generate those reports and email them to the client automatically – wow!  No human intervention, yet the client receives a report as detailed or as simple as we set it, automatically.

Like ALM, AWR also use human-like requests to search engines when it's working.  And what a list of engines to choose from - way more than we'll probably ever need - the count is over 1000!  And engines are monitored constantly to ensure search algorithms are up to date.  A feature we use often, having clients in other parts of the world, is the Google preview tool.  This lets us check our customer's rankings as their customers would see them in their location.  For us, this is very important.

These 2 products are now our backbone SEO tools that help us deliver to our clients the information we need them to know, wherever they are, to track their progress.  At a glance the monthly AWR reports we send out (all done automatically of course!) show up and down trends in ranking, enabling us to quickly deal with problem areas if needed.  And AWR has found some lucrative keywords and phrases that no one had considered previously, allowing us to add more value to our clients with little extra effort.  And that makes us look good, which is important given our price structure.

We’re excited about the opportunities Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager open up to us as web designers and SEO specialists.  Not only does it take the guesswork out of many tedious SEO and web design tasks, but they give us an extra pair of hands to accomplish those tasks.  And they don’t need lunch breaks or annual holidays!  The perfect employees!  Bottom line is that we couldn’t run our business without them.  And this is all after less than 30 days, using the trial version!