WebCEO Review
Webceo is really a great package. In this review I’m going to cover the ways that I use it and why I have found it extremely valuable. I’ve been using SEO software for years, since 1999 or so. Way back then the software I used was WebPosition (previously owned by First Place Software). It did it’s job, telling me how/why I was positioned in the search engines (organically), and what I could do to increase my positions. It downloaded updates and kept me ‘in the loop’ if I needed to update a page title, or content on a page to help my positions.
I still pull out the old Web Position software from time to time, but it’s become dated, and unfortunately it will not run well in Windows 7. So, I’m off searching for something better when I hit on WebCEO. I heard for years that Web CEO is a great program, in fact I wasn’t even sure it could be so good after all of the hype surrounding it, but now I have ‘seen the light’ and do believe that it is top notch at doing a few things really, really well, and for the other things – well it’s ok at that too…
When working with SEO software there are some very important points to keep in mind, you really want something that will not leave a footprint for the search engines, getting you banned because of your page content, or because you are using the tool and it is querying the search engines over and over – so you have to be able to really control the speed that you are using the tool – WebCEO does that beautifully. In my opinion it’s way to cautious at first, and will take hours to get back usable data on a large group of keywords, but after my quick adjustments, and enabling caching I can get good ranking data for nearly 200 keywords in around 1 hour. That’s not too bad. And the data is very usable too, letting me easily compare to previous rank checking that I’ve done throughout the silo sections of my site. I have one site that is close to 1,000 pages and it requires siloing. So, the key here is to setup specific silo rank checking features for each main silo (category) of your website and go from there.
Now, WebCEO is kind of a ‘linear’ model, if you follow the help guides…. They want you to go from Keyword Finding, to Ranking/Checking, to Building Content, to Finding Link Partners, to Auditing, etc… but you can jump around if you want to. I started with rank checking and found it very useful, after the tuning I mentioned above. In fact one of my favorite parts of webceo is the ‘check all ranking pages’ option which easily returns every page that is ranked in the search engines I choose. What a great job. It lets you see the keywords sorted by engine, or by keyword, and it’s a great way to see what is in the engines. You may find, as I did that some keyphrases are in one search engine while missing from others, and you can quickly go about finding a way to solve that little problem!
The Keyword Finder is fairly proficient too, though it is a bit too highly focused on KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for my liking. Either way it does a good job of grabbing keywords based on your one search term and letting you see where there may be some ‘open spots’ to grab rankings based on low competition. It works almost the same as Market Samurai, though I would place Samurai a little higher up in this regard. I also like Micro Niche Finder for finding new/unique keywords as well as Keyword Snatcher and Webcomp Analyst.
The use of projects is kind of confusing and actually one of my least favorite parts of this software as everything is focused on domain, so it becomes impossible to have 2 projects with the same domain which can be annoying at times. Either way you can still have separate profiles that you use with the domain so it works out that way instead, it’s just a little harder to keep track of.
I will continue this review in the next week or so as I complete the Link Finder and Auditor part of the software. Stay tuned…
**Update (July 7, 2010)
I’ve been working with WebCEO now for another few weeks. I did find a way to speed up and optimize the rank checking task, I have it down to about 1 hour now for 250 keywords/phrases, so I’m happy with that. I’ve been happy overall with how the rest of the software has been performing, it does an excellent job, for example compared to Market Samurai it outperforms in rank checking. I had a site that dropped rankings completely and MS would not show any previous rankings for the site, until the rankings come back online, but Web CEO has no problem showing that site, and the dropped rankings just fine, even letting me compare my dropped rankings to previous ranking checks on any date – now that’s spectacular.
One thing I do not like about WebCEO is that the estimate of time left to complete the rank checking is way off. I found a decent way to speed this up a little, and make it a little more accurate. Do not ever scan through more than 2 pages (20 listings) in the search engines. That will help you speed up the rank checking, but still not as much as the tweaks I made to the Settings->SE Requests tab.
So far so good, watch for my next update where I try to find Affiliate Partners using the WebCEO -> Find Link Partners section.
To check out Web CEO on your own follow this link: http://www.webceo.com
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