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A Review of SERP tracker SEscout

SEscout is now a year old, after launching in November 2010 and the product is certainly now more mature and reliable. But, does the product live up to its own tagline of being ‘the most powerful SERP tracker ever created’? Let’s find out:


SEscout – the positives
  • Unlike some product dashboards, SEscout’s dashboard gives a clear overview of everything in one neat view. It’s easy to immediately pick up what’s going on. Scan frequency (on the free plan) is once a day, but this rises to hourly crawls for the paid plans, which should keep even the most impatient happy.
  • The panel at the top that gives a general overview of your PR, number of backlinks and top position in Google/Bing; is a winner. 
  • Reports are available in both PDFs and CSVs
  • The packages span a range to suit most needs, with the cheapest being $14.97 and the most expensive being $99.97.
SEscout – the negatives
  • SEscout lacks a ‘Help’ section. I guess the design is pretty intuitive and the target customer is a tech savvy one, so perhaps the creator feels that no Help section is needed.
  • Sometimes the numbers produced for a keyword’s SERP does not match what a quick check finds. It is usually within 1-2%, which is probably fine unless you are a professional. But I don’t see this product as aimed at Professionals, so that’s probably not a problem.
  • SEscout sometimes loses track of your keywords SERPs for a day or two, as you can see here with FoxNews.com’s positions:



Pricing

The Free plan offers 10 keywords, which is a good number to focus on in the early days of your SEO drive for your website. I’ve been on the free plan for the past couple of months and apart from the lack of downloadable reports, there’s nothing that I feel I am missing out on. Personally, I could see myself buying the Lite plan next year. A keyword limit of 50 would more than cover my needs and I expect the needs of anyone monitoring a single site.




Alternative solutions

www.SerpFox.com is a very similar service to SEscout, with similar pricing but less frequent crawling (every 4 hours). The interface is clean and simple and the fewer features might appeal to some amateur SEOs.

With big name clients like Mint and Symantec, Authority Labs is the leader in this space. The service does not offer a free version, but rather a 30 day trial, which may turn some users off. The feature set is impressive though.

Summary

A useful tool, with a Free Plan that gives you an excellent idea of whether or not its worth paying up for. Rating: B+

This is a guest post written by Bruce Murtagh, co-founder of Vetter
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