SheerSEO Review - How to Monitor Your Site’s Search Metrics

In every SEO campaign, it’s crucial to record important site metrics and then to optimize and improve upon your sites based on those metrics. What am I talking about? Current and historical search rankings for your targeted keywords, Page Rank, top referring links, social media votes, keyword density, and indexed pages. If you’re not monitoring these elements on a regular basis, you’re probably missing out on a lot of your site’s search traffic and SEO potential.

You can pretty much get all of this information manually from the search engines. For example, you can search in Google for your keywords and look to see where your site is ranking. You can use the Google toolbar to find PageRank and the “link:” operator to find referring links. You can even find indexed pages by using the “site:” operator or by looking through your Google Webmasters account.

Despite all of the data being freely accessible within the search engines, sometimes it makes sense to use tools and software that automate the process and make SEO easier for you. After all, you’d rather analyze the data than spend time collecting it, right? Tools are extremely beneficial. Not only for your own SEO efforts, but also for the SEO community at large. Read my post on what SEO software means for the SEO community for more on what I mean.

SheerSEO Review

SheerSEO is an online service and seo software tool created by Eyal Aldema that allows you to automate the process of collecting your sites’ SEO metrics. As I mentioned before, you can get all of this information manually, but using a tool like SheerSEO helps you to save time and analyze what’s important rather than waste resources on constant data collection. Furthermore, SheerSEO is especially useful because it stores historical data for many of its metrics. This means that you can go back and look at trends and dig into your site’s SEO progress. For example, if you notice a steep drop in organic search traffic, you can go back and see if a drop in rankings or a drop in indexed pages is to blame.

The metrics that SheerSEO records and keeps track of are: current positions, historical positions, current page rank, historical page rank, current referrers, historical referrers, current social, historical social, main referrers, single word density, double word density, triple word density, current indexed pages, historical indexed pages, current supplemental index ratio, and historical supplemental index ratio.

All of this is useful information when conducting a thorough SEO campaign. To demonstrate each metric, I tested the tool for WinningtheWeb.com using a few of my core keywords. The screen shots are below.

SheerSEO Pricing

All of the metrics that SheerSEO reports on are freely available but the tool essentially charges for the convenience and automation of obtaining them for you on a regular basis. There are 3 types of licenses based on update frequency, number of keywords, and number of monitored pages. Below is the detailed pricing chart.

If you’d like to try out SheerSEO, there’s a 3 month free trial that you can use to experiment and collect information about your site. It’s definitely worth a try - especially if you’ve never been exposed to the SEO metrics I mentioned.

Shortfalls of SheerSEO

Although SheerSEO is a nifty little tool that helps you collect data about your site, it’s important to note that the metrics it uses are very simplistic. In other words, everything is publicly available so there’s not much competitive advantage in using SheerSEO other than for convenience and automation.

Another issue is that everything is hosted on the SheerSEO web based system. There’s no option to export the data and if SheerSEO were to go down, all of your precious data would go down with it. If I were to pay for this service, I’d need an export function so that I can save my data and manipulate it however I need.

The Verdict

There’s no doubt that search rankings, Page Rank, indexed pages, and top referring links are important SEO metrics that need to be monitored and acted upon. However, a lot of times the data collection process can be a big hassle and prevent us from consistently obtaining this information. SheerSEO is a possible solution to automate the process and get the stats that you need. There are other free tools out there that do similar things, but in my experience none are as simple and easy to use as SheerSEO, especially if you’re a newbie just starting out.

Try the SheerSEO 3 month free trial. You may actually learn a few things about your site that you didn’t already know.

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