There are many free and paid search engine optimization management programs out there which can make it difficult to choose which one to use.
But offering free trials and free downloads can help make the decision easier.
Web CEO is one of those programs which offers both freely downloadable and paid versions. Today I am going to review the free version.
I have only just started to use this tool but I must say I’m impressed with the variety of detail one can get from it.
I started using it to analyze my own sites and was impressed with the reporting. However I find the most impressive part of the package is the link analyzer which gives you the ability to not only analyze your sites or those of your competition, but also compare the links of the sites.
For example I compared two sites against each other. Both are in a similar industry but one has been around for much longer than the other.
The link analysis took over 1/2 an hour but from it some valuable things were learned
For one thing, there are a few links which both sites share. In other words, an external site has a few pages which links back to both sites. Upon drilling down in this report, one can see which pages link to the sites, and how many links per domain each of the sites is getting.
This can be an incredibly powerful tool, should you need to analyze and compare your competitors links to your own.
Not only will you find similar linking patterns – that is pages that link to your site as well as that of your competition, but you will also find some other sites from which you can request links.
This tool also offers you the ability to perform keyword research. It can retrieve search volumes from multiple sources and even show you the currently ranking sites for those key phrases. In addition, on the Google SERPs the program adds the URLs PageRank to the page giving you a comprehensive snapshot of the top ranking sites.
The tool also has a pretty decent site page analyzer. It can look at your page and make some basic recommendations for optimizing it to better target keywords.
Finally, the site auditor produces data similar to Xenu, but it also generates a fairly comprehensive report showing you areas for improvement on the site as a whole.
As a site improvement tool to use on your own it is an exceptional tool. But as a competitive analysis package it is equally impressive.
From analyzing and comparing links, to site audits and keyword suggestions, this tool can help you find those smaller areas of the competitors site which you can exploit.
For example, if the site auditor finds orphaned pages, perhaps you can build or improve the linking to similar pages on your own site. This could help boost their rankings ahead of the competitor.
Simillarly, you can find additional links for your site which the engines have deemed worthy for your competitor.
Finally, you can use the tool to analyze their keywords to see if there are any phrases there you should also be targetting.
