I was given the opportunity to review a software product called SheerSEO so I’ve decided to write an in-depth review on the software and what it can do to help you understand your current rankings among many other features.
There are a lot of software tools out there that will help you with SEO, but I found a few specific features with SheerSEO that really stood out to me that I will discuss in this article.
One thing to start off is that SheerSEO works inside a web browser and allows you to use all of the functionality without the need to download any application, this makes life easier in my opinion. I also wanted to note that almost all features that deal with reporting contain various ways to show graphs and history of your data. You can also export all of this data into PDF data straight from their interface.
Ranking & Reporting Tools
When it comes to SEO it’s important to be able to track and monitor keywords, SheerSEO allows you to enter any number of keywords and track the rankings on each through Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines. You can easily click through and even find the exact ranked position of where the article is currently ranked to see the results for yourself. Every week I also receive a report in my e-mail stating if my keywords have either moved up or down within the search engines. I found this to be really useful, it’s a nicer reminder and great for keeping track on a regular basis on my rankings.
You can setup various options for this such as PDF or CSV formats, email frequency and which search engines you want your reports sent from.
Page Rank & Backlinks Information
You can view your current homepage PageRank score and also view backlinks that are providing a lot of the link juice. They label this as “PR Boost” and also include if the backlinks are do-follow or no-follow links. I was able to find that someone I interviewed shared a post on their site passing some link juice to Voices Of Marketing to increase my own PR score. This was really interesting for me to be able to see this data and how much certain links are really proving to be beneficial.
You can also get a count for the backlinks pointing to your site and the historical changes for this data.
They have a tool they include called the “Backlink Checker” which is a feature which enables you to guard your site’s valuable backlinks. The chosen guarded links will be monitored daily and if there will be any change in status for one of the backlinks, you’ll be notified. I really like this feature as you can see if a link is deleted or removed and be notified right away.
Social Media Data
SheerSEO also provides information about Twitter and Facebook sharing, I can count the number of Facebook shares, likes, comments etc from my site and track this through their reporting tool.
They also support social book marking statistics from the web 2.0 site Delicious.
On-Page Keyword Density & Index Tracking
You can view a graph showing various, single, double or triple keywords based on the density keywords are used on your website. This is great for determining what type of keywords you may need to adjust for ranking purposes and what keywords you may want to use more often if there are specific keywords you are attempting to rank for.
You can easily run reports and view data on your current and past indexing data within Google. This will show you what content Google has picked up through their Crawl bots to index within the search engine.
Conclusion
After running a demo of the software I found there to be some really useful tools within the SheerSEO suite, especially the ability to see where your link juice is coming from affecting stats such as PageRank. I also really like receiving weekly reports regarding my current rankings. The tool does also allow you to monitor multiple domains with what they call a “master” account, this is useful if you are monitoring clients websites as well as your own sites.
You can read the overview of pricing options on their website here.
I’d recommend trying out a free trial of the software, if you find it to be useful you can upgrade after 60 days and purchase a monthly package.
