Searchmetrics review

Searchmetrics is an SEO tool but also a content marketing platform that’s designed to maximize the number of eyes on your website. The platform gives you access to essential information about your site like search engine rankings, keyword targeting statistics, and link sharing metrics. Searchmetrics is primarily designed for enterprise-scale businesses, although it has some affordable plans for small- and medium-sized companies.

Can Searchmetrics help propel your website to the top of search results? Let’s take a closer look at this software to find out.

Plans and Pricing

Searchmetrics is fairly inexpensive for small businesses in need of SEO data. But, it can get pricey very fast for larger companies in need of historical ranking data or multiple users.

For small businesses, Searchmetrics offers two limited plans. The Research Cloud National plan costs $97 per month or $970 per year. This tier gives one user SEO data for all website traffic from a single country going back five years. However, only current search engine rankings are available and you cannot export data from the software.

The Research Cloud International Plan costs $173 per month or $1,730 per year. This gives you access to traffic data from 6 countries and includes search engine rankings as part of the historical SEO data. You can also export up to 50,000 records.

It’s important to note that neither Research Cloud plan allows you to analyze specific keywords. For that, you’ll need to buy the entire Searchmetrics Suite. Pricing for the Suite varies based on your number of users and data needs—you’ll need to contact the company for plan options. That said, Suite pricing starts at around $3,000 per month for medium-sized businesses.

Searchmetrics Suite plans include multi-user management capabilities, customizable dashboards, and access to the Searchmetrics API for advanced queries. You also get access to an unlimited SEO history from the more than 30 countries for which the company collates data. Depending on your plan details, users can also create independent SEO management projects.

Features

Searchmetrics brings together a handful of different tools to give you a comprehensive picture of your website’s SEO.

 Domain-level Research

The most essential feature of Searchmetrics is SEO research, which is largely contained within the Research Cloud portion of the platform. With this tool, you can search for any URL and get an immediate overview of how it’s performing in search engines.

To start, the platform gives you insight into organic and paid visibility in search engine results over time. You get access to five years’ worth of data (more for Suite users), so it’s fairly easy to see how visibility has changed over time. It’s also easy to break down visibility by desktop vs. mobile or by organic vs. paid. However, you can’t set up custom categories without exporting records.

One of the best things about conducting research with Searchmetrics is that it’s simple to compare your website against competitors. You can compare overall domains or individual pages, which is particularly helpful if you want to look at how one of your products or service is selling relative to those that competitors are offering.

The most actionable comparative information relates to visibility and keywords. You can check at a glance the desktop-to-mobile traffic ratio for your site and a competitor’s, as well as track your relative search engine rankings over time. Searchmetrics also identifies how many keywords two websites have in common, but only Suite subscribers can dig into this data further.

 Keyword Analysis

Keyword analysis in Searchmetrics is broken down into discovery and ranking tools.

With the discovery tool, simply enter a keyword and the platform will return a list of all related keywords. For each keyword, the tool displays the search volume for that keyword, the distribution of search volume over time, and the cost per click for advertising.

However, Searchmetrics doesn’t clearly tell you how competitive keywords are. There is information about how much you’d need to spend to have your site rank with a specific keyword. But, you have to dig down into the software for this metric, which can be time consuming.

The ranking tool allows you to readily monitor your website’s position for any keyword you’re currently using. You can also filter keywords to limit your search results. Searchmetrics tells you your site’s search engine ranking position for that keyword as well as calculates your cost per click.

From that, the software also compares your return on investment on a keyword to your competitors for shared keywords. You can also pull up a graph of how your ranking position for a keyword has changed over time. The user interface makes this advanced data somewhat difficult to access, but having it at all is a huge plus.

Content Development

Searchmetrics Suite also includes a content development tool, which the platform calls Content Experience. This tool draws on keyword and SEO data to help you create blog posts and other web content.

The most useful part of this feature is the built-in keyword analysis. Content Experience will identify “Must Have Keywords” based on your current search engine rankings. Better yet, it will calculate the target number of mentions for each keyword and keep track of your coverage as you write.

Content Experience can be integrated with WordPress and Drupal, although you can also write posts within the Searchmetrics platform.

Interface and In Use

The Searchmetrics user interface is clunky, to say the least. While it’s relatively straightforward to run basic searches, digging into your data requires you to look very closely at the results for pop-up charts and hidden tables. For example, you wouldn’t know at first glance that the keyword rankings tool allows you to compare your return on investment against multiple competitors.

The menu design to navigate Searchmetrics isn’t great, either. Your navigation is controlled by a series of drop-down menus and you can’t have multiple tabs open in the platform. That limits your options for running side-by-side comparisons on multiple keywords unless you export the data to another software.

Importantly, Searchmetrics Suite users get more options for dashboard customization as well as white-label reporting. So, there’s a bit more flexibility to bend the software interface to your needs.

Support

Technical support is extremely limited for Research Cloud users. You can’t call in or email for help with the software. Searchmetrics offers an online knowledge base, but it’s fairly technical if you’re just starting out with the platform.

Suite users get full access to Searchmetrics’ support team. You can call or email and receive support in English or German. Phone support is limited to normal business hours.

The Competition

Searchmetrics is in a highly competitive field of software packages offering combined SEO and content research. Moz Pro and SpyFu are arguably the most well-positioned competitors, since they offer less expensive plans for small- and medium-sized businesses. SpyFu in particular stands out because it offers a layout that’s easier to navigate, as well as more interactive comparison tools for keyword analysis.

Final Verdict

Searchmetrics is a highly capable tool for SEO rank monitoring, keyword analysis, and SEO-driven content creation. Most of the platform’s best features, including keyword analysis and the Content Experience tool, are reserved for enterprise-scale businesses. However, smaller companies can still benefit from the straightforward SEO ranking tool and access to historical data. Searchmetrics’ user interface could also be vastly improved, but this shortcoming isn’t enough to hurt the software’s value.

• You can sign up for Searchmetrics here.

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