It’s no secret that Google searches are a gold mine for anyone who can successfully achieve those coveted top positions in Google’s results.
But the reality is, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second, so you won’t be able to get to the top without a good strategy. What’s more, since most internet users don’t venture beyond the first page of the SERPs, you need every SEO tool at your disposal to compete for those valuable slots.
Ultimately, your success with search engine marketing depends on the quality of the SEO software you use. SEO tools can help enhance the overall performance of a given website – from blogs to e-commerce stores – in the search engine results.
Some of these tools can work together for even better performance, forming what we in the industry call an SEO toolkit. I’ve reviewed some SEO tools before in previous blog posts, but today, I’m going to focus on an excellent SEO tool called SEOmonitor.
Ready to try SEOmonitor? If you’re interested in giving SEOmonitor a go, the guys there have allowed me to offer you a special extended 30-day trial, rather than the standard 14 days. All you have to do is use this promo code: tRWlHJ
SEO software review: SEOmonitor
SEOmonitor aims to help marketers get a better glimpse at the overall landscape of organic reach and traffic for their industry. That’s why it covers quite a lot of ground in just one tool, with several groundbreaking features:
- Organic Traffic
- SEO Campaign
- Keyword Research
- Competition Insights
- Content Performance
- Issues
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- Search Reputation
- Business Case Builder
One of the greatest things I’ve found about SEOmonitor is that it can be integrated with Adobe Sitecatalyst, Google SearchConsole, SEMrush, Majestic, and of course, Google Analytics.
With these native integrations, SEOmonitor is able to gather all of your website’s organic data, manage the Not Provided solution, provide insights on keyword data, and competitors!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about what kind of tool SEOmonitor is.
What is SEOmonitor?
SEOmonitor is primarily a reporting tool, providing a full set of data on organic keywords – which can also be used to research keywords and topics. It gives you a full breakdown of the keywords providing traffic to a website, complete with metrics such as:
- Search volume
- Clickthrough rate
- Average position
- Number of search visits from each keyword
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- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
I’ll go over a lot of the best features in SEOmonitor in more detail, but first, I want to highlight a top feature in SEOmonitor: the Topic Explorer. SEOmonitor’s Topic Explorer focuses more on “topics” as opposed to individual keywords, which is a big deal in today’s search environment, because Google has been moving away from simplistic individual keyword ranking in favor of latent semantic indexing (LSI).
The Topic Explorer tool links different keywords to a topic to find semantically-related keywords, so if you input a topic as broad as “car insurance,” for example, you’ll get a huge list of keywords associated with that topic – not just keywords with “car” or “insurance” in them.
The team at SEOmonitor have also developed their own metric known as Visibility Score, which is a more intuitive way to assess keywords rather than the arbitrary “Keyword Difficulty” metrics provided by most other tools. Visibility Score blends rankings and search volumes in a way that makes it more relevant, insightful, and easier to understand than other SEO performance tracking approaches.
Pretty helpful, right?
The Origin Story of SEOmonitor
The team behind SEOmonitor were originally part of an SEO agency – they were marketers providing SEO work for clients. Then, in 2013, they were hit with the same problem that pretty much every single SEO agency and professional had to deal with: Google’s encrypted organic searches. Suddenly, there was much less information available for predicting or measuring SEO performance.
To solve the problem, these business-minded marketing pros created a tool and delivered it to a market full of SEO brands and agencies that needed it. SEOmonitor was officially launched in 2014 as a tool to measure and predict SEO performance.
Today, the company supplies over 2,000 brands with its services and continues to grow. In fact, SEOmonitor even won the EU Search Awards in 2016!
SEOmonitor Features
Winning the EU Search Awards is obviously a big deal, but SEOmonitor didn’t get there by accident.
So, what is it about SEOmonitor that has won over professionals all over the continent? Let’s take a look at the tool’s main features!
Automatic Keyword Research
In order to earn top results for your keywords, you have to start by understanding their competitiveness and relevance.
SEOmonitor helps by sifting through thousands of keywords that are relevant to you, revealing how challenging it would be to rank in the top 10 on the SERPs, and suggesting the value you can expect if you successfully rank in one of those top 10 spots!
It’s particularly helpful to have all of this keyword data concentrated in a single tool.
Opportunity Indicator
What good does it do you to rank first in Google for the keyword “dancing shoes” if you sell gluten-free pizza doughs? You may be highly ranked, but it’s a waste of an opportunity to rank for irrelevant keywords – and if you run an ecommerce or content website, it’s a waste to rank for too many keywords that lack buyer-intent.
Fortunately, SEOmonitor provides a feature called the Opportunity Indicator. By measuring the search volume, the difficulty, and the rank of each tracked keyword, SEOmonitor is able to prioritise the keywords that are likely to have the biggest impact on visits in the shortest amount of time. This is the kind of data that’s worth every penny, especially when you have limited bandwidth or resources to put toward content creation, because it lets you focus your attention on the activities that will make the biggest impact.
Visibility Score
A professional SEO tool isn’t complete without the famous “Visibility Score Metric.” The Visibility Score is a core SEO performance metric, allowing you to see an accurate measurement of the overall visibility of a group of keywords in Google at a single glance. The score is expressed as a percentage, representing your impression share in the organic results: how many times a user saw your website in the results page, from the total number of searches on your keywords.
SEOmonitor does the trick by giving you an overview of the overall performance in Google. It helps you to identify changes and anomalies in your SEO performance, compares them with non-brand traffic, and shows which keywords (or keyword groups) influenced overall visibility the most.
Business Forecast
Every agency insider today is aware that most people want you to forecast future results based on the work that you have suggested. This is a universal trend, although the accuracy of these predictions is really a whole other conversation.
SEOmonitor, on the other hand, is able to provide solid insights on potential future results. All you have to do is understand the shown data and choose from some of your keywords groups, select the average position that you expect to achieve at the time, and then just hit the forecast button. SEOmonitor then produces a graph like the image above.
This Business Forecast feature makes it easier to build SEO proposals based around projected results, such as the number of non-brand organic visits the client will have on a monthly basis and how many conversions this new traffic will generate. An excellent addition to this tool is that it takes into account the seasonality of the industry and the current rankings and traffic values. It’s a pretty comprehensive approach!
For the price of the tool and the features that are available, SEOmonitor really can be used for companies of all sizes, including both on the agency and client side.
Content Performance Review
The Content Performance Review provides an analysis of external content pointing to your site, giving you a fantastic overview of how your outreach campaigns are working. And yes, you’ll see all the normal metrics of any backlink analysis, such as:
- Domain rating
- Social media shares
- Visits and conversions to your website
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- Link status
- Anchor text
But the beauty of SEOmonitor is that it goes above and beyond, showing the effect on the Visibility Score for any particular landing page.
And to make sure you don’t miss anything in the daily routine, this analysis is updated every day, so that you have all the current information and are up-to-date on any significant changes, anomalies, and particularities.
Organic Traffic
I have found that SEOmonitor allows you to connect your website profile to Google Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst, which broadens the potential uses of this already fantastic tool to even more people. The majority of SEO software suites will only allow you link together a single analytics software, most likely Google Analytics.
But we’re not talking about just any SEO tool, are we?
SEOmonitor allows you to hook different analytics tools up to your website without charging extra for it. And once you have connected your analytics package to SEOmonitor, you’ll get more than just organic traffic metrics, including:
- Organic conversion rate
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- Organic conversions
- Organic revenue
All this data wrapped around your campaign tracking makes for more precise, informed decisions. Integrating Google Search Console query data, you will start to get a feel for which keywords are actually generating traffic, as well as pinpointing topics for you to optimise.
Another cool thing about this, is that in your setup process you will have it added in your brand terms. The terms allow SEOmonitor to split out the brand and non-branded traffic!
Would you like to know how? Well, a magician tends not to reveal his secrets, but here it is: With the integration of Google Search Console, some clever algorithms running in the background are able to match up your organic traffic to landing pages – plus the keywords from both your currently active campaign and Google Search Console – to bring a good indication of the split.
It’s not always 100% accurate, but it provides you with valuable insights that would’ve remained unknown otherwise. This could be the competitive advantage you’re looking for!
Competition Insights
Want to see exactly how you compare to the competition?
On the Competition Insights page, you’ll be able to compare the Visibility Score trend of your top competitors, as well as their current Visibility Score for desktop and mobile. You’ll also see their top keywords, how many keywords you have in common and their domain score.
Below, you’ll see a list of all the keywords that your competitors rank for. Detailed metrics show you exactly how these competitors rank, what kind of changes they’ve seen, and more! You can hover over each element for even more details of what kind of content is working for the competition.
SEO Timeline: Events Correlated to Rank Fluctuations
When looking at the keywords in your SEO campaign, you can click on the little calendar icon to see a complete timeline for that particular keyword. This timeline shows you events such as landing page changes, HTTPS migrations, new backlinks, Google algorithm updates, and more. It then shows you exactly how your rank for that keyword changed as a result of those events.
This fantastic timeline tool gives you a special insight into how your actions affect your ranking. Want to pass along what you’ve discovered to your client or teammates? Just click the “Share Insight” button at the top of the event timeline. This creates a special link to a dedicated page that shows this timeline, and allows for comments and discussion at the bottom.
Flexible Pricing
In an effort to make the pricing policy a bit more fair and accessible, SEOmonitor uses a different pricing system from most tools: The price that you pay for SEOmonitor depends on the number of websites and keywords that you track.
One website and up to 300 keywords – the cheapest option – is €49 per month. With every website that you add, while keeping the same number of keywords, the price increases 10 euros. For every 100 or 1000 keywords that you add extra, the price increase varies.
If you’re running a larger business or agency and tracking more than 100,000 keywords, a custom price is designed exclusively for you. The cool thing is, whichever pricing plan you decide on, you will always have unlimited access to all the features, so it’s not one of those pay-to-win kinds of tools that we see in almost every corner these days.
When paying more than €300 per month for the tool, you will also have unrestricted access to pitching resources, which comes in handy for any agency or professional looking to escalate.
Who is SEOmonitor for?
At this point, it’s fair to say that SEOmonitor offers an incredible number of features. We’ve already seen a number of them!
But the truth is, the list above hardly even scratches the surface of this comprehensive tool.
Take a look:
So, with so many features, it’s a fair question to ask who would benefit most from using this tool. Is it for small business owners, marketing professionals, agencies, or somewhere in between?
Well, let’s consider what a reasonably fair cost-to-benefit ratio might be.
Because of the price is customisable, it can easily scale for small or large teams, whether in-house or agencies. But if you are a freelancer and have quite a lot on your plate right now, SEOmonitor might be a way to clear up your time and start delivering even better results, which may greatly benefit your career.
In more general terms, everyone can benefit greatly from this tool if they do a little twist and turn. To take full advantage of all the features that SEOmonitor offers, though, it’s probably best suited to agencies who handle SEO for many different clients.
That being said, any SEO content marketing experts or teams will have a blast exploring and using the technology within SEOmonitor. This tool will absolutely bring new life and excitement to your search campaigns.
Pros & Cons
I’ve been working with SEOmonitor for quite some time now, and one great way I’ve found to communicate the value of a product is with a quick list summarising its pros and cons. There are some fantastic features here in SEOmonitor, but there are also some things that could use some improvement. Let’s see what they are!
SEOmonitor Pros
Daily search engine updates
Before SEOmonitor, I had to use other ranking tools with weekly and/or bi-weekly update features. If you consider that SEO is a long term process and organic changes need some time to be tracked, it’s understandable that daily search engine updates wouldn’t be so necessary.
However, when I work with larger websites, their contents change frequently, so I soon realised how useful a daily update feature could be in uncovering SEO issues quickly. With SEOmonitor, I am now able to diagnose important SEO problems as soon as they crop up!
Easy to group and smart-group keywords into folders
Working as a digital marketer, you know that our daily marketing tasks take a lot of time. This has a direct impact on how much you can bill and how efficient you are with your work. SEOmonitor helps with its keyword smart-grouping feature, where the system suggests keyword groups based on the keywords you are tracking. Anything that can save your expensive, precious time is worthwhile in my book!
Keyword cannibalisation warnings
Keyword cannibalisation is something to take seriously, as it can potentially damage your rankings for multiple reasons. Keyword cannibalisation happens when a website’s information architecture relies on a single keyword or phrase on multiple parts of the website. While this can occur unintentionally, having a bunch of pages that target the same keyword can cause real problems.
SEOmonitor has a filter that shows how many times Google has changed your landing pages in the SERPs, targeting the same keywords. If too much change is found by SEOmonitor, it means that Google can’t decide which keywords relate to which page. By looking into your cannibalisation list, you’ll be able to create new pages or update the content on those pages.
Forecasting
I know I mentioned Forecasting before, as it is a really helpful feature for setting up goals in your SEO campaigns, but the tool is just so fantastic it deserves its own spot as a pro of SEOmonitor.
When focusing on a set of keyword groups, SEOmonitor will forecast the amount of traffic and PPC costs, and predict a what-if scenario. The forecasted data is based on your Google Analytics data that the account is linked to. For this, SEOmonitor has developed an algorithm predicts the revenue you are generating from your organic traffic and the grouped keywords you are tracking.
This feature is quite handy as a way to estimate the monetary value of your SEO efforts. In practical terms, you can share these numbers with a client or your executive team – or anyone who doesn’t understand the SEO process in detail, but always cares about the bottom line.
As I mentioned before, forecasting isn’t always accurate, but it gives you a sizeable advantage to have some real-world numbers at your disposal.
Opportunity indicators
Arguably one of the most interesting features in SEOmonitor is the Opportunity Indicator. This is nothing but a basic calculation of how much revenue you would earn when you nab the top result. By looking at these indicators, you can adjust your keyword strategy to capture more revenue with less effort. It’s very helpful when you can set revenue and sales goals for your SEO efforts by defining position-based KPI’s.
Easy way to learn competitor keywords
Admit it: you’ve always wanted to take a quick peek in the competitor’s backyard to see how they handle their stuff? The good news is, SEOmonitor lets you easily investigate your competitor’s keywords and see which ones are frequently used. This step will help you find new opportunities, while thinking of strategies to outrank your competitors on the search results page.
Yes, many other SEO tools have similar functions, but SEOmonitor shows competitor insights for specific keywords or keyword groups that you are focusing on as well. Plus, you can see which keywords are generating clicks for the landing pages of your competitors. This is a handy way to try and reverse engineer your competitor’s success!
Download desktop and mobile SERP snapshots as HTML page
Remember what I just said about saving time all the time? Well, this feature gives you an idea of how your pages are indexed in the real world. Once again, you’ll save time by not needing to switch back and forth to Google to check SERPs and meta-tags. This is as practical as it gets!
SEOmonitor Cons
Confusing user interface
SEOmonitor is a tool that provides a bunch of useful information and insights across many features. That may be why its interface is so crowded and occasionally confusing. There are a lot of icons and buttons you can click on within the tool, but they are not exactly marked or named in any way. Unless you get in the habit of hovering your mouse pointer over every element on the page, you may miss out on valuable features!
It’s also worth mentioning that when working with a lot of keywords at once, the UI refreshes and computes the data, which slows down the browser window, slowing down the overall speed of your work.
Forecasting
Although I included forecasting as a pro for SEOmonitor, it’s still not a perfect feature. The forecast number that SEOmonitor gives you is very broad. My bottom line here is, if you rely TOO much on the traffic or revenue number provided, you might compromise your business. Remember, these numbers aren’t set in stone, so be cautious about basing your company’s future on these kinds of forecasts.
Steep learning curve
There is good documentation with SEOmonitor, but getting used to the tool and finding the best workflow can be challenging.
It’s also somewhat expensive because of its daily search engine updates. But as mentioned before, if you have websites with lots of pages that are frequently changed, daily updates can be useful, which makes the price worth it.
SEOmonitor FAQs
How many languages does SEOmonitor cater to?
Currently, SEOmonitor supports 20 languages, including: English, French, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, and Romanian.
Does SEOmonitor work on WordPress.com as well?
Yes. Users will just have to disable the default SEO options in their WordPress.com accounts.
What does SEOmonitor integrate with?
Here are just a few of SEOmonitor’s popular integrations:
Conclusion
Honestly, there is just so much to appreciate about SEOmonitor. One of the tool’s key strengths is its effortless keyword tracking across desktop and mobile.
Adding hundreds of high-value keywords is child’s play – within minutes, you have the ability to review performance, monitor competitors, and uncover the most promising keyword opportunities available for your website.
Whether you’re monitoring 100 keywords or 5,000, it’s always easy to understand how an SEO project is going via SEOmonitor’s Visibility Score metric. The score measures the actual impact of ranking changes, taking into account the various features that each query can trigger in the search results. Combined with the app’s ability to connect keywords to conversions and revenue, it makes it easy for both you and your clients to monitor and understand your SEO efforts and results.
SEOmonitor also makes it easy to access the data you need to make recommendations, confirm insights, and pull together reports. The ability to separate branded traffic provides for a greater level of transparency. Meanwhile, the team is ALWAYS open to improvement – iterating constantly and not only listening to feedback, but implementing it.
The interface can be challenging at times and powerful features are often hidden away. Luckily, the in-app live chat is always available if you need help. Another thing I’ve noticed is that, whenever new features are being added to the app, this can result in some functionality/usability issues. While the support team are awesome at responding right away, it does sometimes take up to a day or two for those issues to get fixed, which is something to be aware of.
Ultimately, SEOmonitor takes care of everything when it comes to creating and monitoring an SEO campaign. If you don’t have such a tool, or you have one but aren’t satisfied, give this one a try.
If you aren’t a current customer and would be interested in testing SEOmonitor for yourself, just know they are very helpful. They also offer a migration service to assist in any migrations away from other software. But if you don’t want to put your money on it yet, then consider signing up for a free trial and request a demo with the team.
Again, the guys at SEOmonitor have allowed me to offer you an extended 30 day trial instead of the standard 14 days. Just use the following promo code: tRWlHJ
So, are you interested in giving it a try, or are you already an SEOmonitor user? What are your impressions about the tool? Share your opinion in a comment below. I would love to hear it!
With the ever changing landscape of the SEO world, it is essential to stay up to date or ahead of the curve. With so many providers offering different SEO software, it is essential that you regularly evaluate your SEO toolkit to ensure you have the equipment needed to help.
As part of my tool review series, I have been reviewing SEOmonitor using this website as a test to see how it stands up against the rest of the industry.
If you make it to the end and want to try the product, then I have an extended 30-day trial promo code waiting for you!
SEOmonitor covers a lot of different features and modules to help digital marketers get a full picture of the organic landscape. Those modules include:
Organic TrafficSEO CampaignKeyword ResearchCompetition Insights
Content PerformanceIssuesSearch ReputationBusiness Case Builder
One of the great things about SEOmonitor is that it can integrate with Adobe Site Catalyst and Google Analytics gathering your websites organic data. It also integrates with Google Search Console as part of the Not Provided solution, SEMrush for keyword data and Majestic for competitor insight.
The next part of the review I will take a look at five key modules of organic traffic, SEO campaign, keyword research, competition insights and the business case builder.
Organic Traffic
SEOmonitor allows you to hook up your website profile to both Google Analytics and Adobe Site Catalyst, opening the potential of using this tool to more people. Many SEO software suites only give you the ability to only include one type of Analytics software, with GA being the most common. If you did want to have a different analytics platform added to your account, it generally comes at an additional cost.
Once you have hooked up your analytics package to SEOmonitor, you not only see organic traffic but other important metrics including:
Organic conversion rateOrganic conversionsOrganic revenue
Having all this data alongside your campaign tracking makes for more informed decisions. With the integration of Google Search Console query data, you start to get a feel of what keywords is generating traffic, and provide topics for you to optimise.
During the setup process, you would have added in your brand terms. This allows SEOmonitor to split out the brand and non-brand traffic. How? I hear you ask. With the integration of Google Search Console and some clever algorithms in the background, they match up your organic traffic to landing pages, and keywords within both your campaign and GSC to bring a good indication of the split. Although not 100% accurate, it provides you with some valuable insight that you may not have been aware of.
SEO Campaign
The SEO campaign section of SEOmonitor is where you would spend most of your time monitoring the campaign, making changes, filtering and adding annotations to the timeline.
As with most tools, SEOmonitor provides you with the ability to group your keywords into buckets or topics. By splitting these terms out, you can start to focus on the topics that are of real focus for the business.
Another cool feature that SEOmonitor have and one that I have not seen use by anyone else are smart groups. These are groups that are created based on rules that you want to check. The tool tags all of the keywords that match the criteria and puts them within the group. The group is constantly updated, and keywords are added and removed as they hit the criteria. Some basic ways of using smart groups include the following:
Groups by positionGroups by specific landing pageGroups by opportunity score
One area of SEO that all software seem to be implementing is opportunity scores, and SEOmonitor is no different. The opportunity score in SEOmonitor predicts how much effort is required to get the given keyword into the top 3. The platform provides you with a nice indication of the opportunity with a pie chart approach, and when you reach the top 3 you are rewarded with a trophy.
Alongside the opportunity score comes the difficulty score which is provided in a percentage, and displayed using a coloured bar depending on how difficult the software feels it is to be visible for the term.
Although these scores should be taken with a pinch of salt, they can provide an indication of where you should be focussing your efforts to get maximum ROI.
Another of the campaign section is the ability to switch between keywords, landing pages and topics.
I tend to spend most of my time looking at the landing page view. This view provides you with the ability to analyse what terms are driving traffic to your pages and how well the page is converting. From here you can make informed decisions about whether the page is working or if changes are needed to bring the keyword visibility inline with the topic that you are targeting.
Keyword Research
One of the most important parts of any SEO campaign, SEOmonitor uses a robust keyword research feature utilising the integration with SEMrush.
Within the keyword research tab, you can either conduct manual keyword research or have SEOmonitor suggest keywords based on the setup.
Manual research
As with other SEO software, you can add in search terms separated by a comma into the box provided. When you hit the analyse button, SEOmonitor will go and gather all the data that you need from SEMrush, Google Search Console and your analytics provider. From here, it will list all the terms added and related terms for you to make decisions on. Once you are happy with the keyword or phrase, you can start tracking the term instantly and add them to the most relevant keyword group. If a group hasn’t been added, then you can create one right there.
Automated suggestions
As mentioned earlier, the automated suggestions are based on your setup and the initial analysis of the URL you are tracking. As shown below, keywords are displayed with all the information that you need to make a decision.
This can be really useful if you are struggling with keyword research, and can provide you with new angles to look for.
Competition Insights
One thing that I come across quite a lot in my day to day use of SEO software is the need to have different competitors associated with different keyword groups. Within competitor insights in SEOmonitor, you are able to choose up to five different competitors per keyword group that you have created.
By selecting the add new competitors button (as shown below), you are provided with a list of competitors based on the keywords that have been chosen. If these competitors are relevant, you can select them by clicking on the add button. If you have already have selected competitors, you can add their URL in within the box provided and hit add when they appear.
You can repeat this process across the different keyword groups if there are different competitors per industry, or you can retain the main competitors across each of the groups.
Once you have added them in, you can see at a quick glance for each group their visibility score, estimated monthly visits and majestic score. This can give you an understanding of where there is an improvement to be made, and which competitors have the majority market share.
Business Forecast
If you are agency side, then you are aware that most people want you to forecast future results based on the work that you have suggested. The accuracy of forecasting in SEO is a whole other conversation, but SEOmonitor does provide a good tool to give you some insight into potential results.
Choose from all or some of your keyword groups, choose the average position that you would expect to achieve and hit forecast. The tool will then produce a similar graph to the above showing potential growth over 12 months alongside additional traffic, revenue and the probability of achievement.
And there you have it. A whistlestop review of SEOmonitor, a cloud-based SEO solution that really does stand up against its competitors. For the price of the tool, and the features that are available it really could be used for companies of all sizes, including both agency and client side.
Are you an SEOmonitor users? How are you finding the tool? I would love to hear your comments below.
If you are not a current customer and would be interested in taking SEOmonitor for a spin. The guys have allowed me to give you an extended 30 day trial instead of the standard 14 days by using the following promo code tRWlHJ.
