One great way to track your web ranking is by using Raven Tools (the original SEO platform). Bearing in mind, the best strategy to stay ahead in terms of web content queries and search results data is by using Keyword Rank Tracking as a starting field.
And if you only can Start Tracking SERPs, you can easily keep an eye on your marketing campaign progress. Especially, by tracking your keyword rankings across multiple search engines, devices, or zip codes daily, weekly, or monthly.
The Original SEO Platform comes in handy in so many ways. For instance, you can use the Platform’s Grey TickCreate to share white-labeled SEO reports. Or even the Grey TickUtilize for rank tracking, auditing, and backlink research tools. Whilst, Grey TickIntegrate is for Google Analytics and Search-Console metrics.
What Is Raven Tools?
Raven Tools is a cloud-based digital marketing platform with a complete set of SEO audit and automated reporting tools for web marketing. It’s trusted by thousands of agencies, in-house marketers, and media companies worldwide. Uniquely, Raven Tools helps transform their SEO into a measurable marketing channel. It offers competitive performance analysis features.
Some of its analysis features include rank tracking, competitor research, keyword research, backlink research, website audit tools, etc. It also provides SEOs and web marketers with easy reporting tools to efficiently acquire and track important metrics for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) too. The business was founded in 2007 in Nashville, TN by two advertising executives.
Today, the company’s mission was to create the best and affordable SEO platform in the market. In 2017, the company was acquired by TapClicks, Inc. the leading provider of unified marketing operations, analytics, and reporting solutions for media companies, digital marketing agencies, brands, franchises, and HIPAA-covered entities.
Meaning, Raven Tools is now part of the TapClicks platform family of brands. Including; AdStage, iSpionage, and Megalytic. Raven continues to lead, build, and grow its platform to provide the best SEO insights and reporting products for digital marketers.
What does Raven Tools offer?
As I mentioned, the TapClicks owned platform is feature-rich when it comes to web SEO and marketing. With its new reimagined platform, you’ll even Get Deeper Competitive Insights for your website (get started). Not to mention, with Deeper Competitive Insights, you’ll uncover competitor ad copy, keyword choices, and landing pages.
Whether it’s landing new clients or managing campaigns more efficiently, Raven helps you benchmark and monitor exactly what’s important to you and your clients. Supercharge your online marketing reports with Raven.
Consider the following user benefits:
- Get a granular view of a website’s SEO issues.
- Create beautiful, interactive reports in mere seconds.
- Store loads of marketing research data for unlimited reports.
- Organize and store an entire link-building campaign for content outreach.
- Integrate 20+ data sources, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console
According to targetinternet, the Raven SEO suite of tools* was originally designed for SEO’s (and by an SEO agency) but they now include quite a few extra features that would benefit other disciplines of digital marketing.
Including integration with a number of email services, social profile data integration and PPC Ad reporting, and CallRail integration. For this review, we’ll stick primarily to the SEO features, but as you will discover, Raven Tools is a reporting powerhouse. Below are some of its Key Features.
Onsite Optimization
We’ve long been a believer that there are parts of the SEO process that just can’t be properly automated. You ideally need an SEO expert to diagnose onsite optimization problems and get the most out of your website because while there are checks you can run and things you can do automatically, no tool will ever be able to spot all the things a human can.
Nonetheless, we are all for anything which streamlines the process. For many years Raven’s Site Analyser did precisely that in some very client-friendly ways. However, there’s a new tool on the Raven Block, and it’s even better than Site Analyser. The new tool is called Site Auditor and it crawls your site in the same way Google would.
Whilst, looking for potential issues with your architecture, broken links, or other errors. If you have existing audits in your account using the old tool, they will still be available, but Raven is offering everyone the opportunity to switch to the new service, and it’s definitely an upgrade if you do.
Just be aware, you will lose previously run audits so store what you need offline and proceed around that upgrade option carefully when it’s presented to you.
Site Auditor
In my opinion, Site Auditor is the best feature inside of Raven Tools. That’s because it goes SUPER in-depth on issues and problems (including advice on how to fix them). Now, to be clear: their site audit feature found a lot of issues weren’t actually issued at all.
For example, it marked some internal links as being nofollow. But when I looked at the details, these links weren’t actually on the page. That said, I did uncover a handful of problems that were worth fixing (like images missing alt-text). Raven Tools is definitely designed more for SEO pros.
Meaning, they don’t mind letting you know EVERYTHING that’s possibly wrong. And if you’re a seasoned SEO veteran, you know what to focus on and what to ignore. So yeah, if you haven’t done a site audit in a while, this feature can help you quickly ID issues and problems.
The audit highlights issues relating to:
- Visibility
- Metadata
- Content
- Links
- Images
- Semantics
- Page Speed for Desktop and Mobile
Having such an exhaustive rundown of on-site SEO factors can be useful for highlighting the blind spots in your optimization. That said, it’s important to bear in mind that some on-page factors will have a more significant impact on your site’s performance than others, and these should be your priority.
Site Auditor gives you a color key indication of the level of importance of each of the key areas it highlights, and this is a useful guide to those new to on-site optimization.
Competitor Research
The toolset has become so well rounded over its years of development that it could benefit any marketing team, becoming the go-to system not just for SEO but for Search engine marketing, Link building, or even Influencer marketing or Affiliate management.
Marketing Reports and access to multiple industry-leading data sets and services is a massive strength of this product. Here’s where you can compare your site to a competitor in terms of:
- Total backlinks
- Citation Flow and Trust Flow
- Moz Domain Authority
- Average PageSpeed
- Social shares
Sounds pretty cool, right?
Backlinks Explorer & Keyword Research
Basically, Backlinks Explorer is Raven’s link analysis feature. The data that you get here comes from Majestic SEO. So, it’s not as good as Ahrefs, but still pretty good. That said, the fact that you get a feature bundled with Raven makes the tool an overall solid value.
You essentially get a decent link-building tool for free… on top of all of the technical SEO-focused features inside of the program. In terms of Keyword Research, this works like most other keyword research tools on the market. You type in a keyword and get data (like competition) on that term. You also get a list of long-tail versions of that keyword to target.
Link management
Raven’s Link Manager is a powerful link management facility, providing a dedicated CRM for backlink monitoring and competitor analysis. It taps into the Majestic database to discover up to 50,000 backlinks for any URL. You can also manually add any links or import links from spreadsheets as well as auto-import links found in Google Analytics which is a great time saver.
All your backlinks – including those discovered via Majestic and any you’ve added manually – can be easily monitored using the Raven Tools Backlink Explorer, which flags up important considerations such as toxic links and no-follow-tagged links. You’ll be able to see the authority (trust flow), type, and anchor text of each link.
The other dimension to Raven Tools backlinks reporting is Link Spy – a competitor analysis tool that analyses links to your rivals’ websites in much the same way Raven checks backlinks to your own. This is a useful resource for performing a gap analysis between your current search performance and your goals.
Allowing you to gain vantage over the backlinks that feed into a competitor’s high search visibility. As well as give you a basis for emulating and potentially surpassing their success. Raven offers a link reporting module that will be useful for agencies running link-building campaigns for clients and needing to report on monthly link-building activity.
There are also some built-in link research tools powered by data from Majestic SEO, Moz, and Open Calais. These are going to be a useful addition to small businesses. Or even DIY SEO’s who don’t want to pay for additional subscriptions on more advanced link research tools.
Search Analytics
This pulls data from The Google Search Console’s performance report. And unlike the GSC, you can easily spot changes in your average position for important keywords. You can also connect Raven Tools to your Google Analytics account.
When you do, you’ll get information on organic traffic changes in your Raven Tools dashboard. There isn’t any data here that you can’t find in GA itself. But, it’s nice to have all of your SEO info in one place. SEO and indeed digital marketing overall has always been about spotting trends and patterns.
Raven’s reporting functionality has been built and designed to make that practice as smooth and fluid as possible. The features covered in this review are only scratching the surface of what Raven offers. And having your Google Analytics, Rankings, and link data once more, all in the same system opens up lots of possibilities for clever data manipulation and reporting.
Search Engine Marketing
As search engines continue to reduce the space given in SERPs to make room for pay-per-click advertising, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has become something of a buzzword among marketers. The idea behind SEM is to combine the efforts of SEO with Pay-per-click advertising.
In order to achieve the maximum traffic and exposure for your site and content. With this in mind, Raven now has a dedicated section for Ads, allowing you to pull up detailed reports on performance from Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads. You can, of course, create your own custom reports for these using the reporting tool.
But, the ease with which Raven’s Ads dashboard allows you to get to critical Ad metrics and data. Meaning, you have a robust advertising dashboard to operate from. The ads tool can be hooked up to Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads.
You can even choose to look at Performance, Schedule, Top Performance, Video Ads, Geo (geographic targeting) Insights, Shopping, and Dynamic Search Ads. The Network, Devices, or Click Type sections can further filter any one of these. For the marketer running paid ad campaigns on one or multiple platforms, it’s a real bonus to have all the key metrics you need.
Rank Tracker & Semantic Analyzer
During the period when Raven had no rank tracking functionality, the company had to work extra hard. More so, in order to compete with all of the other SEO tools which were allowed to continue tracking search engine rankings. In particular, Raven worked hard on the reporting functionality.
Raven’s whole philosophy has always been to deliver all the data and information a proactive marketer requires all under one roof. Its new WYSIWYG report builder is the powerhouse that provides this. Whilst, replacing an older reporting tool called Report Wizard which they retired in 2013.
Its Rank Tracker works like any traditional rank tracking tool. However, I did notice that Raven Tool’s tracking supports Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. So if you’re trying to optimize for search engines not named “Google”, this is pretty helpful. Its unique Semantic Analyzer feature analyzes a competitor’s site for semantic info using IBM Watson technology.
It’s a very cool way to find keywords that I haven’t seen in any other SEO tool that I’ve tried. Many other tools require you to step up your whole subscription costs if you go beyond that subscription tiers limit. But, with Raven’s SERP tool you don’t have that issue.
As well as giving you live position rankings from Authority Labs, Raven also allows you to link to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools. Whereby, you can pull their average web ranking data. As well as other useful contextual metrics such as search volume and average monthly searches.
Takeaway,
In nutshell, if you want to dive straight into my top choices when it comes to keyword rank tracking software, you should go with either Raven Tools, SE Ranking, or SEMRush. Early iterations of Raven SEO were widely celebrated for their keyword tracking capabilities – but that all changed in early 2013 when Raven removed their rank tracking system following pressure from Google.
They must’ve been doing something right. We got to speak with Raven Tools founder John Henshaw about this whole episode of the company’s history, and you can hear the interview here. That’s all water under the bridge now though, and we’re pleased to say that Raven’s keyword rank tracking is now back online and better than ever.
Raven Tools is a fully hosted web app, like all the tools in this comparison, and its biggest selling point is the sheer number of integrations it provides with 3rd party tools to pull all your campaign data together. Clearly, they are still refining the system and making improvements to the interface and reporting options. Go ahead and get started today.
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Thanks for sharing this review guide.
This is a very great article that I can recommend to other web readers.
Thanks, jmexclusives!
Now I know that if I want to dive straight into my top choices when it comes to keyword rank tracking software, I should go with either Raven Tools, SE Ranking, or even SEMRush.