This week I have been doing quite a bit of analysis and research into bloggers and online influencers. This has become part of my day job reading, researching and engaging and I am often asked by other PR professionals to give recommendations on some of the tools that I use. So I thought a quick post on a few might help.

To make this test fair I have used a local theme park that my family and I like to visit called Flamingo Land as I thought it would be a bit more fun that the usual corporate stuff.

1. Searchmetrics Essentials

Now today I received an approach (from a friend of mine) for this blog to cover an SEO website analysis tool called Searchmetrics Essentials. Basically, you enter the URL and you get key metricsimage including the site’s visibility on social networks ( Facebook, Twitter and Google+) as well as data about its organic and paid search visibility. The example you are given is that if you type bbc.co.uk into the site, you can see that the BBC web site is estimated to have 68,007,133 Facebook likes, shares, and comments which link to its pages and 35,706,182 links shared on Twitter. Apparently and I quote:

“it is powered by the largest, fastest databases available for search and social media giving instant access to competitive intelligence in organic, paid and universal search, as well as visibility on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +1, Delicious and StumbleUpon.”

image

In the test it found that the site had more than 800 back links.

So do I like it? Yes I do this is by far the best of the three with only one downside. The downside is the fact that the free element shows you some metrics but not everything, you have to upgrade to see the really useful social media metrics. This is clearly its USP and where it feels it can make the money and you can’t blame them for that.

Personally, I like tools that provide you with a lot of information and then charge you for reporting etc. I think I would like to trial the product out for a while with full access before I can give my wholehearted opinion though.

2. URLSPY

A nice and easy free option is URL Spy this is a nifty plain looking site that you simply punch in your image URL/website address and out of the other end it delivers a number of statistics.

As you can see on the right URL Spy reveals that the site gets 35,154 monthly visits and is worth an estimated £12,000. The most interesting part of any analysis for me is usually the amount of links. As the more links something has the better the authority it has. There are a huge amount of other factors but that is a good start. I have linked up the image so you can see what else this application provides.

3. Statmyweb

imageThis site didn’t really start very well as you can see I kept getting a not found message but I persevered and then it kept breaking and so in the end I gave up. Not brilliant and they do need to look at their bugs.

I did use it the other day and it gave me some useful statistics but nothing as good as URL Spy so for now I would stick to using that one if you are looking for a free optionimage

What I do find amusing is no matter which tool you use it seems to give a different number of links. It was the same with the Yahoo site Explorer that used to provide a different number to many of the other tools I have mentioned before here on the dinosaur blog.

Finally, if you have some real money to throw into this area the best site of all is https://www.seomoz.org <This costs $99 a month but it is the best software of all for tracking rankings, keywords and links. Do you have a tool you can use for tracking rankings and web links you want to share?

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.