Can you remember the precise year when SEO started? It was somewhere between 1995 and 2000, near when search engines appeared. 

The TechWyse Internet Marketing agency established their company in 2001. They were standing at the gates of high-quality white-hat SEO because keyword stuffing, link exchange, spamdexing and other black-hat SEO techniques were quite common then. So, TechWyse had a lot of issues to deal with!

We decided to ask DJ Kennedy, CEO of TechWyse, about his experience growing from a small team to one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia Campbell: First of all, I am happy to know that WebCEO helps your business. How long have you been working as an SEO agency?

DJ Kennedy: We established the company in 2001. Since then, we have evolved to be one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia: Wow! Almost 18 years in the market. What is your global mission?

DJ: Our mission is to maintain our legacy as an industry leader and deliver exceptional digital marketing solutions that exceed client expectations. We do this by hiring and developing the most inspired, passionate marketing individuals as part of a creative and collaborative environment.

Sophia: Do you remember your first steps. Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform? 

DJ: We tried a lot of different approaches; now it’s hard to say if it was really worth that. We spent a lot of time on switching between numerous Google Analytics accounts (can you imagine how much time it takes when you have 50 clients’ accounts and more?) and reporting to our clients. Now these tasks are automated so we are focused on creative work, communication with clients, and enlarging our community. 

Sophia: What SEO tools are a must for you? 

DJ: We have a few that we use regularly.  Right now we really like Ahrefs and SpyFu for getting in depth knowledge of a domains back link attribution and also keyword research.

We also love WebCEO and have been using it for many years to gain greater intelligence on our client base.

Sophia: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time? 

DJ: SEO reporting can be a very tedious task. For every client, you are supposed to run a specific set of reports. For example, a keyword research report, a technical audit and an SEO analysis for a new client.  Also, a report on rankings, a backlink analysis, technical and SEO audits, web analytics and social engagement. 

So you begin with scanning and generating numerous reports. Then you check every report for blank spaces with no data. When all the reports for every client are scanned and checked, you can prepare a consolidated report for each client. And the final touch: select the language of the report. This is important for us because some of our clients speak English and some speak French.

Sophia: So you must enjoy WebCEO’s interface which is translated into 24 languages.

DJ: Yes, this feature is truly important! But the report generation still has many steps. When all reports are put together and designed for each client, you have to send them according to individual schedules. 

Some of our clients receive reports once a month. Other clients may need reporting every week. Some may require specific SEO services in their location like St. John’s, NL. Some might say that once a quarter is enough. So having flexibility is important. 

Sophia: Having such a lot of work, did you ever miss deadlines?

DJ: If you miss deadlines in this business then you are telling your client that you are not prepared.  This is not acceptable. This is why choosing dependable software to help with the repetitive tasks is so important. 

Sophia: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

DJ: Preparation and organization! This is not as hard as it seems. Split every process into tiny tasks. Assign tasks to every team member. Set deadlines. Track their performance regularly and fine-tune the process on the fly, instead of checking it all on the last day. A task manager is a must for an SEO team! If a task manager can be integrated into an SEO platform, it’s even better. We enjoy WebCEO’s Task Manager feature – so we never have to search for third-party solutions.

Sophia: What was the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

DJ: This question would need another full interview!  This happened a year ago. One of our clients suddenly lost his rankings for a number of keywords and his website’s traffic dropped. This happened because of a link bomb. We detected a lot of inbound poor-quality links pointing to the domain. WebCEO’s Backlink Checker tool made this easy to detect and, what is more important, neutralize this kind of black-hat SEO attack. 

I can tell you for sure that this was the first time when using the Google Disavow saved our skin! It took some waiting afterwards but, eventually, the client’s website got its rankings & traffic back. Now his backlink profile is clean and powerful. 

Sophia: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

DJ: We do our best in optimizing client sites structure for better rankings, prioritizing the most important pages and bringing more link flow to them with the help of thoughtful on-site interlinking. WebCEO’s Internal Link Optimization is a must for this task.  Using Schema is good form as well!

Sophia: What WebCEO tool really helped your agency grow?

DJ: That’s definitely the Lead Generation button! The button looks simple and prospective customers visiting our website enjoy receiving their free SEO reports. After that, they understand that, with our help, their SEO routine will become much easier. Just in this way, the number of our customers increased 300% in 2015, the year of the Lead Generation button’s introduction, thanks to WebCEO. The lead generation button helped our agency grow financially too. 

Sophia: What tool is a must-have for any SEO specialist?

DJ: Say no more – it’s definitely rank tracker. This is the best way to see the progress of a website. The Rank Tracker report is one of the most important for the client as he can see in what way visitors reach his or her website. When it comes to WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool, both we and our clients are happy to know how many times their website was featured in snippets, shown in vertical results (Google Places, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) as well as in organic and paid search results. 

Sophia: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

DJ: As I said before, our SEO team members have assigned tasks and these form their workflow. However, sometimes there are urgent tasks – we receive alerts from the Technical Audit tool, alerts on ranking fluctuations, and we act immediately. Critical SEO errors can result in decreased rankings. We receive consolidated reports regularly, but these alerts are really good when something urgent happens. You only have to check your mailbox regularly.

Sophia: Thank you very much for such a comprehensive interview! We will do our best to make our customers happier still.

DJ: Thank you for such a great service. WebCEO is a nice fit for us. Without the reports rendered by WebCEO, getting to the root of problems would have taken much longer.  We have been delighted to watch the growth of this tool moving at the same pace as the growth of our own agency!

The post SEO Team Grew to One of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Canada appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In just a few years, the best SEO tools have moved online, now performing in the cloud to collaborating users. These users can access their projects from any device, anywhere in the world. This is why online SEO software is so popular. The only serious choice people are making these days is between having free online accounts or mining the advantages of paid subscriptions.

A contemporary SEO tools list would include more than 80 online SEO programs to choose from, but a comprehensive, really good, web agency oriented set of tools can make a big difference – you can work smarter and faster with them. Some users prefer a mix of top SEO tools, while others go for all-in-one platforms. Let’s take a look at the current field:

BEST SEO TOOLS 2019

Keyword Research tools

• Answer The Public
• LSI Graph
• Google Search Console
• Google Keyword Planner
• WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool

Site audit and SEO analysis tools

• Google Search Console
• BrightLocal
• WebCEO’s Technical Audit and On-Page SEO Issues tools

Link building tools

• Majestic
• Ahrefs
• Linkody
• Link Research tools
• WebCEO’s Backlink research tool

Rank Tracking tools

• Pro Rank Tracker
• WooRank
• SEO Monitor
• Advanced Web Ranking
• WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool

All-in-one SEO platforms

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Moz
• WebCEO

First, we can’t ignore Google SEO tools. The best free SEO tools you can get in the niche are run by Google. There’s Google Keyword Planner, Search Console, Trends, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights. All marketing people need to be logged into these on their browsers.

Keyword research tools

those that show you keywords you haven’t thought about but your potential customers have been thinking about:

This free SEO tool provides a lot of keyword suggestions from Google and Bing. They call themselves ‘a goldmine of insight for today’s marketers’. You can see an aggregated view of search queries with hints about the motivations and emotions of the people typing them. This will really help for inspiration and consumer insight in the age of Google. However, to use the full functionality of Answer The Public you will have to pay $99/mo.

Summary: This online SEO tool is really great to find keywords you never thought about; however, the tool may show keywords which are not relevant. Also, it may not work as well with very specific keywords.

Official website: https://answerthepublic.com/

Summary: These keywords won’t drive you to position #1 instantly, but this will help your content ranking over time, when SEO effort has already been put in.

Official website: https://lsigraph.com/

This is a free Google SEO tool and it’s a shame not to use it. Google Search Console will help you find underestimated keywords which people are already using in their Google searches to find your website. You can also analyze your site’s impressions, clicks and each keyword’s average position on Google Search as well. With the help of Google Search Console, you can make your website shine on Google Search results.

Summary: Every list of the best SEO tools includes Google Search Console. Keywords from Search Console will help you understand what people have already been searching for when they visit your website.

Official website: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

These are also free and they will help you get plenty of keyword suggestions, so you can research them and narrow your keyword list. You can also get bid estimates, so you can plan your advertising budget. Once you have found the best keywords for your website, you can add them to your advertising plan. You can also add them into a major SEO tool platform like WebCEO. You may finalize a list and launch a marketing campaign any time you are ready.

Summary: Google Keyword Planner is a must; it’s really informative. But you will have to wait until your account is matured to see accurate data.

Official website: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

Well, everything looks good, but when it comes to doing even more effective work, you will face the downside of free keyword tools. They usually have low limitations and really lack statistics data. You will have a hard time evaluating monthly searches, bid competition, search trends etc. – so it might not be so easy to pick the most effective keywords on a free tool. Even the AdWords keyword tool won’t give you precise data when you have just created a vendor account: you will only see huge ranges (for example, 1-10k). Once your account has matured, you will see more precise data, but that takes time and money. Which brings us to

This gives you a definite, not an estimated, number of a keyword’s monthly searches from the get-go and offers additional metrics that most other SEO tools don’t even have: for example, search trends (how a keyword’s monthly searches have been fluctuating throughout the year), a keyword effectiveness coefficient, clicks and impressions. WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool can also show the number of local searches per month for an area of your choice. You can also estimate your advertising budget with the bid competition number.

Summary: Relevant keyword suggestions, precise keyword effectiveness metrics, accurate and high quality data and good usability are united in the WebCEO Keyword Suggestion tool. I absolutely love it.

Official website: https://www.webceo.com/

Site audit and SEO analysis tools

Google and the visitors of websites love fast loading sites with zero technical issues. So you have to audit your site for errors on a regular basis. Mobile friendliness, page speed and errors – every factor is critical.

This tool allows you to check the mobile friendliness of your website and see if there are SEO issues (like duplicate titles and descriptions). You may even receive email alerts when Google identifies issues on your site. Unfortunately, it won’t show you a full list of technical and SEO issues on your website. An additional site audit tool is a must-have too, so you can see a full picture.

Summary: Good enough for an instant check of a website’s technical issues and mobile friendliness, but it won’t compete against the top SEO tools.

Official website: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

This is a great choice for those who are working for locally oriented businesses and doing local SEO. It will be easy for you to uncover technical issues with the site’s local SEO profile. The most useful thing about BrightLocal is the ability to audit, clean and build citations from the most popular sites. Also, with BrightLocal you will never forget about Google My Business – we all know how important it is to register one’s location and keyword descriptions with search engines.

Summary: Their automated reports look really good! You’ll have to schedule a report and then wait a long time until it is scanned.

Official website: https://www.brightlocal.com/

You should ask yourself if you really need a standalone tool for technical/SEO audits. The big all-in-one SEO programs offer great auditors, so it will be much easier to use a platform instead of a variety of different SEO tools with separate logins.

For instance, WebCEO has Technical Audit and On-Page SEO tools which scan your site for technical and SEO errors, respectively. Both are completely free if you use the free trial and they won’t add to the variable cost of an agency level paid plan.

Summary: A technical audit for webmasters and an SEO analysis report for SEO specialists are exactly what you need to keep your website user- and search-engine-friendly. Scanning is quick so even if you forget to schedule – it will only take a minute or two!

Official website: https://www.webceo.com/

Next in line are the tools all SEO professionals love:

Link building tools

It shows special metrics like trust flow, citation flow, historical index, fresh index, etc. With all these metrics you can see your improvements and progress. You will see must-have data on your backlinks, so you can estimate if they are naturally earned or you’d better get rid of them. Also Majestic is a data provider – and the best SEO tools use their data.

Summary: Majestic is really cool and affordable – the biggest database on the web, with an easy interface and good usability. However, there are SEO programs that show backlinks divided into two columns: natural and unnatural.

Official website: https://majestic.com/

This platform is also well known for their backlink opportunities. Ahrefs offers its proprietary metrics such as DR (Domain Rating), UR (URL Rating), AR (Ahrefs Rank) which are used to estimate backlink popularity. Also, Ahrefs is not a data provider so you will have to buy a subscription to their platform to have access to their backlink tool.

Summary: This SEO software has a lot of valuable information and you just have to get used to its interface. However, it is not cheap and won’t do for small businesses or solo SEO specialists.

Official website: https://ahrefs.com/

Linkody is an amazing backlink monitoring tool that every webmaster should possess. Its main focus is set on monitoring your backlinks as well as tracking the success of your link-building efforts.

What’s more, Linkody automates the whole process for you! You will get notified when you gain or lose any backlinks and you will have a full overview of the necessary SEO metrics to assess your backlinks. To help you improve your link-building strategy, Linkody will give you insights into your competitors’ link building strategies.

The post 20+ Best SEO Tools in 2019 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As a company providing agency-level SEO tools, we can’t help but look at our customers’ feedback with starry eyes – especially when they write it into a story. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing the Agnew Group, fresh from their all-time record month in both visits and lead generation in January 2019. A leading motor group based in Northern Ireland and one of the top 25 franchise car dealerships in the UK, the Agnew Group continues to go from strength to strength.

Colm Sharkey, Digital Marketing Manager at Agnew Group spoke to WebCEO about his role, all things SEO and how WebCEO is helping them achieve their online goals.

When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

WebCEO and I were first introduced many years ago. I was looking for a cost-effective, all-round piece of software as I developed my knowledge of SEO. The free version was easy to use and provided great insight, making the decision to upgrade a no-brainer. I first used the software whilst I was Website Manager at a leading Utilities company and immediately was able to identify glaring technical errors and make immediate improvements to the visibility of the website. Identifying and fixing the likes of broken links and 404 errors, I imagine, are how a lot of people start off their SEO journey.

Moving on in my career, I setup my own digital marketing agency, Blue Shark Digital, and WebCEO was an essential piece of kit that I relied on. Mainly dealing with SME’s, being able to scan and audit client’s websites and implement immediate and impactful changes and improvements was and is an essential component of what Blue Shark Digital offered.

You now work for Agnew Group and manage 6 websites! That’s a challenging responsibility. How does WebCEO help you with that?

To call it a challenging responsibility would be an understatement, indeed! (laughs) Well, the opportunity was too tempting to turn down. The role at Agnew Group came up and I knew it was one that I had to pursue. Having previously worked in a digital role in the automotive industry, the appeal of Agnew Cars was strong, with the chance to work with brands like Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche amongst others.

Within the Agnew Group we have 6 websites: Agnewcars, Autoexchange, Autostore, Repair Centre, Agnew Leasing and Agnew Motability. WebCEO allows the digital team to monitor each site, create automated reports and alerts and to develop, track and compare different solutions and SEO improvements on the sites. The software makes the somewhat daunting task of monitoring 6 sites manageable and allows more time to be spent on digital strategy.

The digital strategy is continually evolving based on data-driven decisions, of what WebCEO contributes significantly. Each site has their own objectives and users. We track cross-domain traffic within our sites and study the online behaviour of each. WebCEO assists with this process, alongside other software such as Universal Analytics and UX software.

Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

Yes, I have used SEMrush and SE Ranking previously. However, each time I find the variety and reliability of WebCEO, combined with the competitive pricing, the best solution. My current role is the 3rd role in a row that I have subscribed to WebCEO.

What I like about WebCEO is the layout and user experience of the software. Some competitor software packages may have, or claim to have, similar features. However, WebCEO stands apart in terms of the clarity of the reporting, the clarity of the layout and supporting information it provides for each tool.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, WebCEO plugs-in industry-recognised metrics from the likes of Alexa, Moz and others for certain aspects. Having the ability to measure Moz Domain Authority and Alexa URL rank within the software is a massive plus, for example.

What is your favourite tool on WebCEO?

That’s a difficult one, depends which day you ask me. We are doing quite a lot of link-building as a team, and Competitor Backlink Spy is an absolute godsend. In short, I challenge my team to pick a competitor and identify every good link they have and target 85%+ of them to create links to our sites (where relevant).

Yesterday we had a good team discussion about where we are on Bing and Yahoo and what specific things we could do to improve our visibility. With non-Google search engine traffic still at around 10% of total visits, rank tracking on these search engines has proved invaluable. Being able to view Bing/Yahoo rankings and also the traffic from these sites in the same place was handy.

Tomorrow, well… Who knows?

What features do you honestly miss in WebCEO?

Some of the Competitor Analysis tools. I don’t think any one in particular is the authority in this arena, so having several different tools to monitor trends is of appeal. By their very nature, these tools all use different algorithms to analyze and estimate traffic on competitor sites. By having several tools to monitor at once, it can give you a clearer picture. The more tools the better in this regard to keep an eye on those pesky competitors of Agnews!

Congratulations on a record-breaking January! Could you tell us about it?

In January 2019 agnewcars.com had our all-time record month in visits, users, calls and emails. This was led by a 21% and 11% year-on-year growth in organic and referral traffic. With “SEO traffic sources” (search engines and referral) accounting for 65% of hard leads (calls and emails), the priority since I started this role was to devise and implement an SEO and content strategy starting from the neck of the sales funnel upwards. There is plenty of work still to do and scope to significantly improve the performance.

Launching new landing pages, we are able to track over time in WebCEO how we rank for the keywords we target, and the impact of traffic to these pages in terms of lead generation. These landing pages have had bespoke designed based on the latest CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) principles and they have accounted for almost 10% of total leads since launch.

We aim to continue to use WebCEO to assist in the implementation and continuous improvement of the Agnew Group websites.

The post How a Company Got a 65% Lead Boost with Agency SEO Tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The holidays are over, but there’s still enough room for one final New Year’s present!

We are happy to announce WebCEO’s first major update for 2019. The update can be broken down into two major parts.

First: some of our Online SEO tools have become better at doing their job. We’ve taught them new tricks and made them more powerful. Our old-time users will undoubtedly notice how much the UX has changed for the better – kudos to our developer team.

Second: WebCEO now introduces an entirely new subscription plan called the Solo plan (1 project, 50 keywords). It was specifically made for users who are new to SEO and to our tools. If you don’t know how to do SEO, it’s going to change today!

Both groups of users will find themselves pleased by what our team has created. Do you want to hear what exactly makes these two innovations so great?

Well, let’s not keep you waiting!

1. New features

Let’s start with the general improvements made to our tools. What’s new with WebCEO?

Task Manager

It’s common business for several SEO specialists to unite in a team and split the SEO objectives between each other. In situations like this, keeping track of who does what is a priority. This part of our update will be helpful for users of WebCEO’s white label domain feature.

If you have used WebCEO’s Tasks before, you should be familiar with auto-tasks – automatically pre-generated SEO tasks, created from the results of a tool scanning for website issues, that you can add into your working plan without having to create them manually. So what’s the improvement?

Task Manager now has a new auto-task that’s automatically added to your list of tasks upon scanning: Analyze your competitors’ new backlinks and look for missed backlink opportunities. Wordy, but valuable. Backlinks are raw ranking fuel, and we want to make sure you always have as many quality backlinks as you can gather.

Technical Audit

Our tool for weeding out technical issues has made a step towards improving your online security. Now there’s a new type of error WebCEO’s Technical Audit can detect: unsafe links to HTTP websites. These errors will be named “mixed content issues” in your reports.

Why are those links a problem? As you know, the HTTPS protocol is more secure than its older HTTP version. If you accidentally lead your users to another site which will compromise their security, they won’t be happy with you. Don’t treat your users’ experience carelessly; always keep your technical SEO game in its top form!

Scan your site now, you might find more unsafe links than you’d expect.

Project Settings

Do you remember how it used to be when you wanted to change any of your project’s settings? You had to switch between multiple tools to configure each one individually, wasting precious time on loading new pages. Frankly, you can still do that, if you want… But that’s so 2018.

You have a better option now. Project Settings is now a separate page which can reconfigure all of the tools.

And it’s not a popup window anymore. This update has definitely made things take a turn for the better.

Help Center

A minor, but pleasant and useful change in our Help Center: screenshots are clickable now. Long have we been forced to shrink big, highly detailed images into their smaller versions, throwing out so much valuable information. Not anymore. As of this update, you can finally view them in full size with a single click.

It’s good for us, too, because our team can finally let loose with the images we put in our guides.

Competitor Backlink Spy

Now it’s time to announce the biggest of the minor changes, second only to the creation of our new Solo plan. What’s new with our tool for spying on your competitors’ link profiles? Hope you’re ready for this. Here goes…

Competitor Backlink Spy is finally available for free trial users.

Until now, it was the only tool you couldn’t enjoy if you were subscribed to WebCEO’s free trial. But that, too, has been left behind in 2018. The future is a perfect excuse for newer and better traditions!

Same as with every other tool, Competitor Backlink Spy’s free version’s functionality is limited compared to other plans (in order to whet your appetite for more). Free Trial users can pick up 10 backlink opportunities based on a competitor backlink analysis.

Want to sign up and try?

2. “Plan… Solo.”

I wonder if this naming choice was inspired by one of the recent popular movies. But that’s beside the point. Only one thing matters: WebCEO has developed a new subscription plan for its users, named the Solo plan.

“Is this plan for me?”

Let’s see. Do you know how to do SEO? If you answered “no”, then this plan is for you.

The Solo plan is aimed at users who are completely new to SEO and SEO tools. It’s designed to guide users through the process of optimizing their website with the help of a very obvious interface and many, many tips for what to do next.

For example, let’s take a look at the project creation wizard Solo users will see after signing up. Regular users will notice it’s different from the wizard they’ve worked with.

Once you’ve completed the three steps shown in the screenshot (entering your website’s URL, selecting your location and choosing your keywords), the service will generate your very first SEO report where it will describe in detail how drastic your current SEO situation is. Be ready to see a lot of red numbers and words. They will be par for the course if you’re just starting to optimize your site.

(This is just the tip of the iceberg. Click here to view the full, uncropped image.)

“Looks cool! What do I do next?”

This preliminary SEO report is free. You can even copy the link to your report in the address bar and send it to others – for example, to your boss who wants to know how your website is doing. Once you’ve purchased the subscription, the rest of the plan’s features become available. That’s when you’ll see all the suggested steps for your site’s optimization.

Click on Tasks to see everything you will need to do.

Then click on any task to see what tools you will need to complete them. There will be links to those tools, as well. I’ll say this with confidence: working with SEO tasks in WebCEO has never been easier.

Our service will automatically rescan your site every week. You will then receive an email with a report of weekly changes in your SEO situation. The email will even include a link to your SEO tasks so you can jump straight back into work again. Handy!

Do you feel like trying the new Solo plan out for yourself? I promise you won’t be disappointed. If you haven’t joined the ranks of WebCEO users yet, now’s the time to do it!

The post WebCEO Update: New Solo Plan for New Users & Better SEO Tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Running an SEO business is definitely a big challenge. First off, SEO agencies have to swim in an ever-changing ocean of Google algorithms, adapt their SEO activities to these changes and shape an individual marketing strategy for each client site. Second, managing hundreds of clients’ websites is a great responsibility and a big pain. This is where marketing automation tools become a great help. These tools, when designed properly, help to automate routine marketing tasks, provide big data for deeper research and analysis, and help SEO teams to collaborate more effectively.

If you run a digital agency or plan to provide SEO services, you will definitely love this insider information. We recently sat down with Mike Tortorice from Infront Webworks, a US-based digital agency, to discuss their experience in the niche of SEO services, challenges and drawbacks, hacks and workarounds. Here’s what he had to say…

How long have you been in the SEO niche and what challenges did your Digital Agency face?

Infront Webworks has been in Website Design and digital marketing for over 20 years but a little over 6 years ago we started aggressively recruiting SEO experts and building a team to compete with the best in the SEO agency space. In that time, we have won a number of National SEO awards, were the 11^th company in the U.S. to become LSA certified, have built a team that has 130 years collective SEO experience and created a reputable brand in the SEO arena.

Our biggest challenge is keeping up with demand as we grow. Most recently we were runner up for the 2017 US Search Awards “Small SEO Agency of the Year” which proved to be a great way to attract more high profile clients. With this, having WebCEO as a partner really showed that scalability was manageable.

Having the right white-label SEO software at the right time in a company’s growth curve is very important. WebCEO keeps up quite nicely.

What is your favorite feature in WebCEO?

As the SEO and Digital Marketing Manager at Infront Webworks, I have grown to appreciate the easy to understand and intuitive layout of WebCEO that has helped grow departmental gross revenue by 934% in the past 5 years, while consistently maintaining a 95 plus percent client retention rate. Many similar white-label SEO tools miss the mark when it comes to management overview. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a tool that offers a specialist breakdown of proper website metrics and KPI’s at a glance.

How is WebCEO different from similar SEO tools on the market?

With the multi-user functionality, being able to quickly glance at the SEO team’s metrics that are broken down by specialist makes it one of our go-to tools as we go about our work days. Spotting good and bad website metrics at a glance is vital to a specialist and a manager in this role. I don’t believe there is another platform that can dissect between team members at a glance and is equally valuable to the team manager and the specialists who strategize the client accounts.

How exactly did WebCEO help your SEO team save time and costs?

Time is money as they say. With WebCEO, the ability to quickly assess stats fast is tantamount along with finding KPI’s quickly. The platform does all this easily. From a digital marketing and SEO agency perspective, and as a manager on the team, I need a way to keep up on how specialists are performing which can be a huge challenge in this industry. With so many competing priorities having a quick glance of every client’s overview is huge.

The WebCEO Task Manager gives us the ability to segment specialists based on any category of our choosing. For instance, from the initial starting dashboard you can set up custom names for each specialist on your team, as well as assign projects based on department, or maybe a section for competitor rankings. The sky is the limit as you can alter each row to represent any category of your choice. For example, the below image represents the average of metrics of each specialist’s clients.

This gives management a quick glimpse of performance at a high level. If something is off the next step would be to examine deeper by simply clicking on the specialist’s name and opening up their dashboard deeper and taking a granular look.  This will open up a panel listing the particular SEO specialist’s clients in a well formatted list. This breaks down the statistics even further.

From here if we can drill down even further per website under a specialist’s projects for an overview of the site of your choosing. Once again at the project overview level, everything is well laid out and composed. You can also add special widgets to this dashboard. For example, if you wanted to track at a glance traffic over 12 months, there is a widget set you can add to the project level dashboard with a simple click of the mouse.

All the widgets display nicely as they are lumped together into the project overview. The look and feel is sleek and streamlined which is good because WebCEO offers branded access to the dashboard from your own sub-domain if you wish to let your clients see stats at will. This helps agencies remain transparent, which is a present day gripe among new clients who previously had bad experiences with non-transparent agencies.You can also set the permissions so your client will only see their dashboard.

Upon logging in as a customer or as an SEO team member, the project overview is the first thing you will see at the project level. A not-so granular overview of the metrics of your choosing. From site speed to average ranking position the widgets can be set to your liking or set as static for your clients, meaning they cannot be altered via a third party.

It would appear something like this…

By clicking on any of the widgets the tool sets get more and more intricate as far as stats and helpful information goes.

WebCEO from end to end has so much information packed within its programming I can’t think of anything that is not covered important to SEO. Stacked with the ability to provide everything from competitor reporting, backlink toxicity, social analytics to technical website audits, WebCEO is the Swiss Army Knife of SEO in that it pretty much does everything you need for technical level SEO.

Oftentimes in SEO, there is always an extreme amount of jumping around between different SEO tools, but with WebCEO the need becomes less frequent. Pulling information from tools like Google Analytics, Search Console and SEMrush, you can almost always stick with this one tool, finding the information you need at the press of a mouse.

In conclusion, one thing that really separates WebCEO from all the other SEO tool suites is its team management features. No other SEO tool suite offers “at a glance” KPI’s on SEO team member performance and per client stats from a single screen.

WebCEO has all the strength of all the most popular tool suites for the SEO professionals doing the day to day SEO but also offers dimensions for managers and directors that no other tool set does.

I bet you send SEO reports to your customers. Could you please tell us more about it?

We actually do send out monthly reporting. With WebCEO the practice is easy and offers customers a detailed view of how their performance stacks up.  The reports look exactly like they do when a customer logs in to view their account. The PDFs are full of color and insights. A professional looking bonus for clients.

Taking it a bit further you can not only set up reporting to utilize your agency’s branding but you can also incorporate branded reports to include your client’s logo as well.

Reporting is an essential part of what we do. Being able to expand on information and stay transparent lends to our company’s outstanding reputation.

What are the top 3 WebCEO tools which your team uses most often?

The top 3 tool sets our team uses quite regularly are:

1. The Keyword Detail tool – This tool allows us to view the progression of keywords along with the ranking pages. Combining this tool with the Internal Links Optimization tool allows us to capitalize on moving link juice around websites in order to push keywords higher by easily viewing what page ranks for what search terms.

2. The Link Toxicity tool – Gives us insights on bad link mojo. You can set custom parameters to find the types of links that should not be associated with your client’s website, easily create a disavow file and submit it to Google with a few clicks.

3. Competitor Backlink Spy – A phenomenal tool that allows you to view the backlinks of a competitor’s website. If you have ever done a bit of link building, you know the importance of trying to share backlinks that your competitors have through simple outreach and backlink techniques.

Finally, do you have any recommendations from your SEO team on how we could improve WebCEO to help manage your SEO workflow?

One of the nice things about the customer help desk at WebCEO is their responsiveness to our needs.

Recently, we asked the help desk if there was a possibility to add the last scan date to the specialist’s dashboard so we could be sure on the management side of things that client accounts are being scanned by our specialists in a timely manner and to ensure we have a fresh view of the client stats at all times. This way no one is neglected and it keeps the workflow alive.

The response was quick and at the moment they are looking into it with the programmers in order to implement. Again, this would be a great feature-set for our team.

I love that WebCEO does what it takes to make agencies successful.

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