Track Your Search Engine Rankings with SEscout

The web is a huge place. With everyone running their own websites these days, it is difficult to tunnel people to yours, unless you are Justin Biber. One time tested way to get some traction is to befriend Google. Your page is likely to receive more traffic if your links figure on the first page of Google, if not in the top 5 listings on that first page. That’s where SEO can help you.

Sadly, optimizing your website for search engines is not an easy task. It takes good content, good tagging and coding practices, and a bit of luck. That is why the internet is brimming full of wannabe SEO marketers. Even after you manage to find the right search optimization mix, you’ll need to keep tracking how your website rank against your keywords. Sounds like to much trouble?

Fret not. SEscout is here to help you. How, exactly? Join me after the jump to find out.

What is SEScout

Tuning your websites for search engines is a continuous job. Once you’ve identified the potential keywords important to your business, you need to measure how your site performs on each versus your competition. SEScout is a beautifully designed online search engine tracker tool that analyses your keywords and spells out your site’s standing on the major search engines, turning that data into gorgeous reports. At first glance, it looks like just the tool that you need to manage all of your websites’ search engine info in one place.

Google is your best friend and your worst enemy. Befriend Google.

We reviewed this app way back in 2011 and they did score high on our books. Since then they’ve done a lot of changes. Have they managed to retain its charm while improving the user experience? Let us take it out for a spin and find out.

An Overview

There are several pricing tiers available, starting from $14 to $99 a month. The most notable difference among the plans is the number of domains and keywords that you can manage. While you can have 50 domains and 50 keywords with the basic plan, the most expensive plan carries 1500 domains/keywords. The elite plans also features charts and reports galore. There are no free plans at this time, but you can avail the 10 day refund in case you want to bunk out.

Even before setting up domains and keywords, you’ll need to create Groups. Groups are a great way to keep your sites organized, especially when you have too many of them to keep up with in your head. From there it is easy to add your domains. For each domain, SEScout tells you your Google PageRank, the number of back links, the Alexa ranking, and more.

Adding a keyword is incredibly simple. All you need to do is to hit the small + button. For each keyword that you every domain, the application tells your keyword’s relative ranking on both Google and Bing, with the change over the day, week and month. If you are one of those who prefer a neat chart over crunching figures, click the little graph icon at the end of each row. Alternatively you can also export the data, if you prefer, to analyze in your own apps.

Also if you are using any of the premium packages, you can also enable notifications for changes in a keyword’s ranking. You can choose among email, SMS, and push notification (iOS only).

User Experience

The interface looks beautiful, but the User experience was bit of a let down for me. First of all, one would expect much of the application flow from the dashboard. But here it just contains a huge block of text showing the number of domains and keywords you have used, along with a long list of changelogs. The sidebar ends up doing much of the UI heavy lifting. Perhaps they are saving the best for the final release, but this sure isn’t enough.

Another problem is that if you misspell while adding a keyword, you will have to delete it and re-enter it in full. There is no inline editing, which would be a simple change that would be very nice to have added.

Apart from these minor issues the application is very simple. Even a rookie can get started fairly easily. I particularly loved how all the options are neatly knit in a single row. Now, that’s something.

Wrapping up

The plan specifications are a bit weird. You get 50 domains and 50 keywords on the basic plan, which equates down to 1 keyword per site, if you’re running full capacity. This is the case with all the other plans. For full time SEO consultants this could be a problem as they will have a lot more on their plate.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, SEO and marketing is a full time task and might require a team effort. However, all the plans here are for single user and obviously won’t work well for a team. I hope they will launch new plans to accommodate a larger user group.

SEScout is a terrific app, overall. Sure, it has its issues, but it does what it promises to do. It gives businesses a competitive edge and could help your website earn more if it helps you know how to target your search engine optimization work. I strongly recommend you to check them out today.