The official press release mentions a bunch of buzz words, but we have different thoughts behind the successful round of investment:

1. Brightedge might take over other “task management” related software companies. SEO reporting is cool and fun, but for users to utilize a tool  with a long-term commitment a software needs to engage users. A Salesforce wouldn’t be there where it is if people just pulled numbers out of it and still would run sales on Excel.

2. SEO and PR are merging and the PR industry desperately needs a tool
It’s tougher and tougher for the SEO industry to proof results. Especially for SMBs they ROI is just not there anymore and companies are better off utilizing tools such as Upcity (former DYISEO). And with people preaching Content marketing a lot of budget moves into that direction. At the same time the PR industry is in trouble, b/c PR pitches without a good story, just don’t turn out the same way they used to turn out. In fact most larger publications stopped linking out and mentions/citations in newspapers sound great, but the ROI, which everyone is looking for, is tough to track. Brightedge might fill the gap here.

3.  A  consolidation of  medium to small SEO tools is clearly happening.  The market is flooded with new tools every day and the money being made in this space is just not enough for people wanting to cash out. Brightedge might use to take over another SEO tool in the space.

4. Another reason for this high investment might be to fight off MOZ. Moz are the thought leaders in the space, have a huge followership, but they don’t have enterprise-worthy products. The enterprise market is still in the hands of the big 3 (Brightedge, Conductor and Searchmetrics) and a MOZ going into this space might cause some headaches. The money secured will certainly help defend that.

5.  The other thought we had is using the money to invest further into the technology. Brightedge is based in Cali, so the money could be used to higher top dev talent and build something larger than what they currently have. There are tons of  great directions and SEO enterprise software could go,  but since we are not consultants this information stays in-house.

6. International expansion. Not sure if this really makes sense, but with countries around the world going online, this could be an option. Especially since Fortune 500 are working globally with the marketing department often based out of the US.  However, this could possibly be more a long-term strategy.

Do you have any other thoughts? Contact us!

Overview

RankAbove is a platform for search engine optimization (SEO), and its versatile methods apply to Google but also every other relevant search engine. The first goal of RankAbove is to measure how the website is performing in terms of these search engines. After identifying where the shortcomings are, the next objective is to improve that performance. The focus of this improvement is on keywords and keyword phrases, but the RankAbove system also takes into account other parameters that can have either a positive or a negative effect on SEO performance, such as metadata, backlinks and empty pages.

The Good

Most of the best SEO platforms are not user-friendly, and many of the platforms that seem user-friendly are rather ineffective upon close inspection. RankAbove is different and does a superb job of balancing the power and sophistication of the system with user-friendliness. The information provided, however, is not dumbed down; it is simply presented in a layered approach that makes it more readily digestible to the webmaster who is still new to advanced SEO. The platform is very customizable as well, and the advanced user can configure the tools and the data in whatever manner works best for them.

The Bad

We couldn’t even find much that is bad. Rankabove integrates with Adobe Sitecatalyst and Google Analytics, so not really anything to copmlaint about.

Review and Rating

4/5 Stars

RankAbove is a powerful system that requires some tweaking in order to maximize its benefits. The good news is that it uses a layered approach that is newbie-friendly, and it definitely is a platform that will grow with the webmaster as he or she gains experience and skills. The proprietary nature of RankAbove can be hindrance at times. Experienced webmaster will have certain expectations about usability that will not be met, but those can be overcome. Additionally, due to a lack of integration support, the use of RankAbove may cause the webmaster to have to make some hard choices.

Due to those drawbacks, we only gave RankAbove four stars. If those issues don’t affect you, however, then RankAbove is a five-star SEO platform. The basic kit lets you optimize 1,000 URLs, and it lets you track the performance of 250 keywords or key phrases. In addition, keyword research is included. Most platforms hang you out to dry in that regard, but RankAbove puts real effort into determining your optimal keywords and strategies. The system also provides you with in-depth competitive analysis, including on- and off-page reports. Furthermore, if your site is a start-up or non-profit, then RankAbove offers that basic package at a significantly reduced rate.

Overview

A significant challenge in nurturing an online presence is reacting to changes in a timely manner. In the past, changes could go unnoticed for a substantial length of time. Enter solutions like ZoomRank, which give you the power to monitor changes automatically and in real time. Automation is an important conceit in SEO analytics and means that the system will push notifications to the user.

ZoomRank is an entirely virtualized solution. There is never any software to download, and any configuration changes are available to the user regardless of where they log in from. Users can receive notifications to their smartphone or similar device, and they have access to the system from anywhere where there is Internet connectivity, which is particularly powerful for small firms.

The Good

ZoomRank allows the user granular control of the keywords and phrases that the system monitors based on. The system provides automatic daily rankings with an emphasis on Google, Bing and Yahoo. It also provides reliable, accurate rankings for Google Organic, local SERP, local metrics and so forth. The system also features a powerful and highly configurable analytics dashboard.

ZoomRank also provides you with an integrated view of the data, which is an illuminating way to visualize the synergy between seemingly disparate components of SEO. There is, for instance, an emerging correlation between Google Places rank and organic/SERP, and the ZoomRank system can visually demonstrate how the Google Places position is affecting those other aspects.

The Bad

The overall benefit ZoomRank has for a particular Web presence is tied directly to the keywords keyed on. ZoomRank does not integrate a mechanism for determining what those items are. It would be nice to import keywords from other tool. Otherwise nothing really bad about the tool.

Review and Rating

ZoomRank is a powerful and versatile SEO analytics and monitoring tool. It is not, however, hands-off, and it does require a certain level of expertise to get the most out of. For the novice webmaster getting their feet wet in the SEO pool, ZoomRank will likely fall short unless paired with another tool or service that can identify the terms that the website should key on. For intermediate and advanced users, ZoomRank is a powerful and perhaps even necessary tool that stands apart in a crowded segment due to its direct, no-nonsense approach and the granular level of control it provides: 4 out 5 stars.

Before we are going in details, feel free to watch the video below.

Raven now allows you to mark certain traffic spikes with an event. Whether you launch and email marketing campaign or run some Infographics, this new feature is a great way to keep track of why spikes happened.

2.

We haven’t tested Raven’s new Site Auditor yet, but it looks great so far. Here a few errors they look out for:

Pages blocked by robots.txt

• 404 errors
• 301 errors
• Broken internal links
• Broken external links
• Links with “nofollow”
• Duplicate page titles
• Duplicate meta descriptions
• Duplicate pages

Searchmetrics is certainly one of the best enterprise seo software solutions, but their pricing model was always confusing. It was never really clear how to differentiate the Searchmetrics Essentials product vs. the Searchmetrics Suite.

Well..that is a problem of the past: Searchmetrics announced a new pricing model and a clear differentiator:

Searchmetrics essential is “just” for research, meaning you can pull visibility data, social scoring, overall rankings and so on.

The Searchmetrics suite on the other side is the enterprise model where you add your projects and analyze it over time.

We like both products and love how they now have consistant pricing.

Another news from their end is the API, which seems to be a powerful weapon after Panda and Penguin.Especially link builders now have the opportunity to run their link building efforts against the Searchmetrics score. A low score could indicate that the domain has a penalty or just doesn’t show up in the search rankings.

The data is a bit different to existing ranking trackers such as Authoritylabs.:

- Average position

- Top searches

- Clicks

- Click-throughs

After the back and forth between Google and a few SEO software vendors it doesn’t really come to a surprise to me, that they started talking to each other and building a solid solution. A SEO tool without analytics would have not made it far. Congrats Raven!

1. Customizable dashboard – Overall SEO health

The dashboard of Brightedge is completely flexible and allows different reports  to business functions e.g. executive report vs. SEO analyst report.

Events tracking shows specific events, that have been implemented to a project. Competitor analysis and history data.

Another nice feature is dashoard scheduling in a report. This allows quick email reporting to clients or internal stakeholders.

2. Keywords tracking

The keyword tab also shows some powerful data: Page 1-3 Stacked report, average keyword rank, Keywords Rank page 1 & 2, Universal Search Results, Liks & Shares and Rank Report, Tweets and Rank report, Twitter Keyword Volume report,  +1 and Rank report.

What is also interesting is the keyword group reporting where you can track history of the group and compare for example this week vs. last week.  On top filtering is easily possible.

3. Backlinks tracking

It seems that the backlinks tracking is mostly powered by Majestic SEO and Google. Nothing specific to mention here.

4. Coverage Performance report

Total number of indexed pages, indexed pages compared to competitors (also over time and trended),

 5. Actionable Keyword Recommendations

Top 25 keywords to focus on, Social strategies, onpage strategies and offpage linking recommendations. Also great is the capability to assign these tasks to people within the system.

6. Actionable Page recommendations

This is a page manager, which helps where the onpage opportunities are. Again here the top 25 searches to focus on, which shows you pages, which have the best opportunity to gain traffic. Great feature is also the keyword prioritizer. This allows a user to prioritize the keywords to focus on. Again here the page manager allows to assign tasks to different stakeholders.

Also recommendations can be compared to the top 10 results in Google, meaning if your Title tag is off you can get some ideas from the top pages ranking for that term.

The linkbuilding recommendations looked also like a good idea, but not sure if it is worth the effort to use a tool, which bases BL on third party vendors.

Compare your social signals to top 10 ranks is also an amazing feature.

7. Social Signals recommendation engine

Comparing the likes on a specific page of your project vs. the median of the top 10 ranking pages seems to be a great idea and we really like the feature since it its something no other SEO platform has been focusing on.

What’s also great is that the user of Brightedge can assign social signals tasks to the social team of a company and then produce direct results.

8. The facebook fan page setup is also very slick and allows a full analysis of FB fan page stuff.

9. Tasks and Workflow

Personally I think this is the killer feature of Brightedge. It allows the user to assign tasks per keyword, group of keywords, per page or entire site. Collaboration is something no other enterprise solution takes care of. Especially not in a smart way.

10. SEO performance manager

This part looked like SEMRUSH data of organic rankings per domain, but I haven’t verified it. Even if it is third party data  this is pretty interesting since this allows users to add keywords to their tracking and analysis it right in the system. Overall I prefer having a good tool integrating good data from other vendors than wasting time building everything in house (same for backlinks data!).

Top organic pages of competitors is another great idea, which is nice. This way you can piggyback on your competitors success by also going after their backlinks or just copying their onpage strategy.

11. The SEO X-ray competitive analysis pretty much gives you some visibility scoring for your domain. Definitely interesting approach, but hard to read in my case.

12. Keyword Discovery

I’ve been looking all of the keyword discovery tools and I am never happy abou tit. I think Brightedge has a good approach to it

13. Share of Voice report

First I thought that we are getting into social media monitoring and sentiment analysis, which is something most tools missed out over the years. However this is different: The Brighedge share of voice report takes the keyword groups and monitors them against competiton and tells the user, who took the lion share of search traffic. What’s also great it shows how the competitors pages drill down, the backlinks and the onpage differences to your own project

Summary

To summarize it I’ve got a completely different opinion about Brightedge than I had before. It’s a powerful tool with a lot of collaboration tools plugged in. Waht always bothered me with most tools is the fact that they are used solely for reporting purposes and less for actually getting the job done. With my first testing projects this has changed and I see their unique approach in the enterprise space very refreshing. I also give them the kudos for integrating third party vendords data rather than re-inventing the wheel in a bad way.