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Web CEO Full Review

Web CEO Review

Software Type: Desktop Software (Windows)
Cost: $389.00

Web CEO is an all-in-one search engine optimization package. I remember my first encounter with the software about two years ago and at the time I was very impressed with their approach. Their methodology for the whole SEO process seemed to be more in line with my own way of thinking how SEO should be done. During the past few years they have worked hard to have weekly (often daily) updates (at least) and have been constantly improving their software.

As part of this extensive SEO software, they include a keyword research component. It is this aspect only that I was looking to investigate. I grabbed my Professional Edition version and set to work.

My Experience

I hadn’t used Web CEO for a year or two, so it took me a little time to reacquaint myself with the interface. This software does a lot and consequently there are many areas of the software to explore. However, it is also very intuitive. There is a quick launch window that helps you get started quickly and easily. I added my site using the new site wizard. Once I was up and running, I clicked on the Research keywords button and set to work.

In the Keyword Research section, I was presented with three tabs; “Find Keywords”, “View Competitors”, and “Analyze Competition”. I entered “fly fishing” in the find keyword tab and pressed start.

The column on the left hand side began to populate with Daily World Searches, Competition and a KEI calculation. In total, Web CEO found 373 relevant keywords and their corresponding information. In a very nice way, you can then add these keywords to a keyword basket. I really like this method, as you can sort out the junky keywords from the ones with greater potential. You can also set up multiple baskets which allow you to add sets of keywords that you’re targeting.

Unfortunately there wasn’t any method to expand on this keyword list using any lateral search methods, for example related terms. This would be a nice feature to have to continue building the list and sorting out the keywords that look as though they have potential. At this stage, you would have to do this manually and then build the list from within the keyword basket you have set up. I also noticed you can load the keywords from a file if you’re using other tools to build your raw keyword list.

There were a couple of complaints I had at this stage. Firstly, on more obscure keywords, there weren’t a huge number of keywords to choose from. This would signal that their sample size is perhaps a bit small and they need to increase the raw pool from which they extract this keyword intelligence. I guess this may increase over time as this part of the software becomes more established. The other small quirk that I found a bit annoying was I couldn’t add the whole group into my keyword basket. It would allow me to add only about 30 at a time. This became a bit tedious after a while.

Once I was happy with my keyword list, I clicked on the “View Competitors” tab. For each keyword I could select a search engine and it would then load that search term in a browser and I could see the actual result from that search engine. If I selected Google (the default), I could also see the PageRanks for each of these sites that it bought up.

What is so good about this part of the tool, you might ask? Well after a while, you can assess the competition of a keyword just by looking it up in a search engine. Let’s say you load the search term, and get lots of high quality looking sites with highly optimized pages (keywords in title and summary). If they have high PageRank, you know you will have some work to do to overtake those sites.

However, if you see sites that seem a bit off topic, if few keywords are seen and if PageRanks are lower, you can roughly assess how difficult it will be to out optimize them.

This is a nice feature that is not seen in any other keyword research tool.
Once I had gone through and checked out the different keywords and deleted the ones I thought were going to be too difficult, I clicked over to the analyze competition tab. I was immediately excited when I saw the information it provided.

As I have mentioned, I think KEI is only a rough indicator and most of the time is an inadequate analytical tool. There are too many other factors involved with analyzing the competition to rely on KEI alone.

Web CEO’s analyze competition goes further than any other tool I know of, giving you a more accurate analysis of how tough your competition really is. It tells you searches, KEI, pages with keywords in it, pages with keywords in the titles of the page (which is a strong ranking element and shows to a certain extent SEO element), number of links pointing to the first and second site, Alexa traffic rank for sites 1 and 2, the cost of the first two bids (at Overture/ Yahoo! Search Marketing), as well as the PageRank of the first two sites (may be not completely accurate, but helpful). Wow! This is powerful stuff.

All of these elements give a strong indication on the competition of the keywords. It shows how well optimized these sites are that you will have to compete against, as well as how popular they are. It also gives you an idea of the value of that keyword by showing you the top bid prices.

I selected the top 10 keywords and pressed start. I could have selected a different search engine to pull my data from depending upon which one I was trying to optimize for. The search engines included are Google, Yahoo!, Hotbot and MSN. Web CEO went out and pulled all of the data in an efficient, but somewhat slow manner.

I was pleased to see in the settings, that this apparent slowness is a deliberate ploy. The software cleverly tries to mimic human browsing so as to not draw attention to you while you are running these checks. The settings give you quite a bit of incremental control - you can be as conservative, or as aggressive in this way as you wish. I also noticed in the settings you can use the Google and Yandex API directly if you wish. This feature allows you to sign up for a free API key where you can access and manipulate the data directly from the search engines. The results may be slightly different, but you know that you are not violating terms of service agreements in using the search engines in the way that most of this kind of software does.

I couldn’t help looking through the rest of the software features and ended up spending hours doing so. While there isn’t the scope to cover the other features here, I will just say that it is a very complete package and is definitely one to take a close look at if you are looking for an easy method to streamline or improve your search engine optimization processes. They also include some free SEO training and certification for people who buy the software.

 

Summary

So what did I end up with after using Web CEO?

• 373 relevant keywords with Supply, Demand, KEI, Ad Data as well as other very useful competition data like competing pages, Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, and measures of the level of their Search Engine Optimization.

 

Strong Aspects

The strong points of this product:

• The ability to analyze keywords and competition in excellent ways that no other tool offers.
• Nice interface.
• Large number of keywords.
• Ability to import keywords.
• Strong user mimicking settings.
• Lots of extra features that provide an excellent SEO workflow.

 

Weak Aspects

The weak points of this product:

• Poor lateral searching.
• Only one source of keyword analysis of which the sample size was probably a bit small.

 

Who is it ideal for?

While I probably wouldn’t rely on this tool as my sole source of Keyword Research, it would be highly useful for all people who are interested in finding a method to both improve their organic search results, as well as a more efficient method to assess keyword competition more accurately.

 

Ratings

For Niche Miners:
For Search Engine Optimizers:
For Pay Per Click Advertisers:
For AdSense Publishers:
Usability:
Value:

 

Site: Check Out Web CEO Now!