You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, but I think most of us would agree that search engine traffic can be very powerful regardless of the type of website you run. Whether it’s a personal blog, an online marketplace, or a company website, it is in your best interest to rank for your target keywords.
How do you go about doing this? They say that knowledge is power and SerpIntel says that it can provide you with that information. Over the course of this review, we’ll take a look at the three tools included in this software package and how they can help you in your SEO quest.
What is SerpIntel?
According to the official website, SerpIntel allows you to “spy on your competitors the easy way.” It claims that this system is “so effective at robbing sales from your competition, it should be illegal – but it’s not.”
In a nutshell, this “revolutionary covert software” arms you with a load of data related to your website, your keywords, and how they compare to your direct competition. It’ll look at the top ten (or more) search results for your chosen keywords and provide you with the relevant information you desire.
Three Tools in One
This SEO software is downloaded directly to your computer, but there is no real installation process needed. Just de-compress the RAR file and boot up the application to get started.
Double-clicking on the application icon brings up the SerpIntel Launcher utility. It is from here that you get a look at the Rorschach-like character and gain access to three tools contained within: Rank Checker, Competition Checker, and SERP Statistics.
Rank Checker
The idea behind the rank checker is that you can input your (r or anybody else’s) URL and see how it ranks for a certain keyword phrase. It’ll work with Google, Yahoo, and Bing and it can provide results for a broad match, exact match, and all in title match.
Unfortunately for me, the program crashed every time that I clicked on “go” to start the process. It’s unclear whether this is an issue with my computer or the SerpIntel software, so your mileage may vary.
UPDATE: A newer version of the software has been released that addresses this issue. It seems to work fine now. (March 4, 2010)
Competition Checker
The second tool is called Competition Checker and it yields the search results for a keyword phrase. The default configuration shows the top ten results, but you can increase that number through the pull-down option menu.
Using this, you can get such information as the meta description, pages indexed, keyword density, total backlinks, GOV backlinks, DMOZ directory, PageRank, and domain age. This encompasses both on-page and off-page SEO tactics, showing you what the competition is doing to get ranked so high (and what you need to do to get there).
SERP Statistics
The third and final tool in this search engine optimization utility is SERP Statistics.
Using this, you can see how difficult it would be to rank for a certain keyword phrase. It shows you the number of competing pages in the search result and if there are any web 2.0 properties in there.
Ranking for “freelance writer” or “John Chow” is quite challenging; the difficulty factor is “Dont [sic] Waste Your Time.” Some other keyword phrases can yield a difficulty factor like “Doable.”
A Special Price for John Chow dot Com Readers
Despite its relatively simple appearance, SerpIntel looks like it could be a useful tool as part of your SEO journeys. It’s not providing any information that you could find yourself manually, but it does automate the process considerably.
The regular price is $77 and the website is showing a current reduced price of $57. To save even more, enter “johnchow29″ as your coupon code and you’ll save an additional $20. That brings the price down to just $37.
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