Advanced Web Ranking is an online rank tracker suitable for both Digital Agencies and In-house SEOs. The tool boasts usrse among more than 18,000 companies worldwide, and provides ranking results.
$99
per month
SpyFu
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
SpyFu is the eponymous SEO and PPC research platform from the company in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on "spying" on competitors, or basically using their behaviors to refine your own through keyword and content analysis, and backlink poaching. This positional search engine optimization and paid listings management platform touts the ability to lower costs and raise rankings via a Kombat-oriented approach... basically a cute way of saying "it makes comparisons" of how well your site does in niche…
If you want a reliable and accurate keyword rank tracking tool that can spit out beautiful monthly reports for your clients, then AWR is the tool for you. It is also cloud-based so you don't have to deal with the issues of proxies and VPNs like you would if running a similar program from your own server. It's not the cheapest option but it's probably the easiest to implement and most accurate option when it comes to cloud-based rank tracking software. Customer support has always been responsive and pleasant to deal with, I haven't had many issues, but have always had a good experience when I needed support.
If you have a Google ads PPC campaign and then I would say this is more or less essential if you want to know what your competitors are doing. You can get very useful data out of it even if you subscribe for one month. And the pricing is very reasonable. Even if you don't use Google ads, I would say this is still useful for your SEO/SMO team since it gives you a great idea of what keywords and traffic your competitors are working on.
The ability of the program to produce dashboards in web page format. While it can do this, it saves them out as HTML files on your hard drive or cloud server, which makes it super hard to share with others.
The cloud version is a bit more expensive, which offers the same tools as the desktop, which I found a little troublesome and it didn't make sense to me.
Their customer service was a little lacking. I had a couple of general questions and I was on hold for about 15 minutes...which isn't good when you're in the middle of a busy workday.
Love this tool but would like insights from all 3 major search engines not just Google. I would also like deeper understanding of the placement for local businesses on Google Places/Maps. Insight into mobile search rankings and best landing pages per industry would also help :) Overall, SpyFu is a necessity for serious search marketers.
SpyFu comes with a link to tutorial videos. I recommend you watch them. The software is capable of so much you really need to watch the videos and learn how to get the most out of it. When I have a question 90% of the time it's there. When it isn't, and I reach out to them, support is always quick and concise.
BrightEdge is a lot more expensive, but we began using it when funds allowed us to, primarily for the online reporting and features not found in Advanced Web Ranking. But, as I mentioned earlier, we did not stop using Advanced Web Ranking when we introduced BrightEdge because it does have some plus points not found in BrightEdge.
I was surprised to find I preferred Semrush when it comes to keyword research. SpyFu is great (and less expensive than Semrush), but I felt the data Semrush provided was vaster than SpyFu. I was able to get more competitors spending insights in Semrush than SpyFu. Overall, I liked the ability to use both in our keyword research for both paid and organic marketing.