10 Things Enterprise SEO Management Tools Must Do

As a 13-year industry veteran, I have to admit I’m a little jaded. I’ve seen just about everything. That’s why three years ago we built our own search engine optimization (SEO) tool to handle the complex challenges of large site optimization.

Until last year, nothing on the market had ever really met our criteria or really excited me. But we always do our due diligence to make sure that we leave no stone unturned in looking for the best solution.

So I evaluated a number of enterprise class tools (most of which will remain nameless, but rest assured if you’ve heard of it, I’ve looked at it). Much to my surprise, I was so impressed with one in particular that it has become our primary SEO management system and I’m using it to drive results for our biggest clients.

Before I let the cat out of the bag and change your life, let me tell you what I looked for in an enterprise level SEO management tool and why this one was superior to others on the market.

1. Any tool that we use has to be customizable to the criteria we believe is important for SEO success. For example, I don’t subscribe to 64 character page titles. Never have. I don’t need a tool that flags my clients when their titles are longer than 64 characters. I want to be able to set my own character limitation. And I want to be able to set my own criteria for every other page element. That was a must-have.
2. I need the data today. Not next week or next month. Today. And it needs to be up to date and actionable. It needs to pull together rankings, analytics, link data, and page specific data so I can understand performance.
3. It needs to have a task management system in which I can assign SEO tasks that need to be accomplished and keep an ongoing record of what has and hasn’t been done.
4. It needs to have robust reporting features that my clients can log into and view whenever they want — even if they live in China.
5. It needs to have international capabilities so if my clients are in China, they can review their Chinese keyword data in their native language.
6. It needs to automatically e-mail daily if something is wrong (or if something happened that is noteworthy).
7. It needs to have exceptional link management capabilities so that I can manage campaigns from within the system. I don’t want to have to use another system to keep track of links and link campaigns.
8. It needs to have robust keyword research capabilities built into the tool that would allow me to find keywords outside of using Google’s keyword tool like most everyone else does.
9. It needs to have competitive intelligence capabilities that would give my clients a competitive advantage.
10. Any company making such a tool would need to have a solid foundation and I need to know they aren’t going out of business anytime soon.

As you can see, I have a lot of demands. And really these are just the basics.

I never thought I would find a tool that would meet these criteria. But I did. It’s called seoClarity.

I don’t work for these guys, but I’m a huge fan of their tool. And as always, I love bringing attention to people and products that deserve it.

These guys deserve all the attention they get. They have a great product and they have even incorporated a number of my personal suggestions into the tool (which I’m very proud of).

I tried a lot of tools last year when evaluating whether to migrate from our in-house, custom-built tool. Many had nice features. But none of them could run with seoClarity.