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
Alternative solutions
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
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:
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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.
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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