SEO is the foundation of any digital marketing strategy. If you get it right, you can watch your user base, search rankings, and engagement rise dramatically. So, it’s not surprising that there are now more SEO tools than ever in the online world. From Surfer SEO to our current discussion, Raven Tools, how do you know which is right for you?
Raven Tools is yet another SEO solution. If you have used any site-auditor, competitor research, or other cloud-based SEO software, then Raven Tools will feel familiar. If you’re looking for a new approach to digital marketing and analytics, you likely won’t find it here. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage Raven Tools to achieve your goals.
What is Raven Tools? And is it worth leaving your current SEO software? Find out in this review.
What Is Raven Tools?
Raven Tools is meant to be your one-stop-shop for all things SEO, digital advertising campaigns, and monitoring social media conversations.
With Raven, you can immediately research not only your brand, but competitors, follow search engine trends, device link-building strategies, create ad campaigns, and more. All of this can be conveniently done from the Raven dashboard.
Raven pulls data from a wide variety of excellent sources, including SEMrush and Majestic, to create detailed information about keywords, links, and social strategies.
While Raven isn’t exactly cheap, it does all of this at a somewhat lower price than its competitors. Raven has a 7-day free trial and monthly plans start from $39/month. While that may seem expensive, industry-leader SEMrush starts at $99/month making Raven seem like a bargain by comparison.
Raven Tools Main Features
- Site Auditor
- Competitor Research
- Backlinks Explorer
- Keyword Research
- Search Analytics
- Google Analytics
- Rank Tracker
- Semantic Analyze
How To Get Started With Raven Tools
You can try Raven Tools for 7-days for free. To sign up, you create an account with your name, email, and password. You don’t even have to give them a credit card . After you verify your email address, you’re ready to begin.
The first thing you do is enter the web URL you want to work on. From here, Raven will walk you through everything you need to know. It will begin with an SEO audit and crawl the site for any errors, technical problems, and anything else that may be affecting site performance.
It’s also helpful to connect your Google Analytics and other accounts to get more detailed stats. After this, you can start addressing the technical site issues or check out the other features.
After this, it will take a little time for Raven to crawl your website, social, and email. When it’s finished, it will provide you with everything you need to do to improve your SEO and other ranking factors.
Raven Tools Pricing
Raven has five plans matching a range of needs, from small businesses up to large digital marketing agencies. Here’s the breakdown of their differences:
Small Biz | Start | Grow | Thrive | Lead |
$39/month | $79/month | $139/month | $249/month | $399/month |
Campaigns/Domains : 2 | Campaigns/Domains: 20 | Campaigns/Domains : 80 | Campaigns/Domains : 160 | Campaigns/Domains: 320 |
Users : 2 | Users : 4 | Users : 8 | Users : 20 | Users: 40 |
Backlink Explorer (Majestic): 20 Reports (up to 5 Million URL results) | Backlink Explorer (Majestic): 40 Reports (up to 2 Million URL results) | Backlink Explorer (Majestic): 60 Reports (up to 3 Million URL results) | Backlink Explorer (Majestic): 80 Reports (up to 4 Million URL results) | Backlink Explorer (Majestic): 100 Reports (up to 5 Million URL results) |
Stored Links : 25,000 | Stored Links : 50,000 | Stored Links: 75,000 | Stored Links : 100,000 | Stored Links: 150,000 |
Monitored Links : 25,000 | Monitored Links : 50,000 | Monitored Links: 75,000 | Monitored Links : 100,000 | Monitored Links: 150,000 |
Monthly Page Crawls: 50,000 | Monthly Page Crawls: 400k | Monthly Page Crawls: 2 Million | Monthly Page Crawls: 5 Million | Monthly Page Crawls: 7 Million |
SERP Tracker – Keywords, Competitors : 1,500 | SERP Tracker – Keywords, Competitors : 15,000 | SERP Tracker – Keywords, Competitors: 20,000 | SERP Tracker – Keywords, Competitors : 25,000 | SERP Tracker – Keywords, Competitors: 30,000 |
Link Spy (Majestic + Moz) : 10 Reports | Link Spy (Majestic + Moz) : 30 Reports(up to 300k Links) | Link Spy (Majestic + Moz) : 40 Reports(up to 400k Links) | Link Spy (Majestic + Moz) : 50 Reports(up to 500k Links) |
What Are Raven Tools Main Features?
Raven Tools is designed to be the one place you need to go for all your SEO and social marketing needs. It includes these features:
1. Site Auditor
This is the foundation of Raven. Raven evaluates your site on 17 essential SEO metrics, including page speed, links, and visibility, to create a report with actionable insights. It will then give your site a score between 0-100.
You then use this report to solve the problems on your site to improve your rank. Some of these are easy enough, like fixing broken links or optimizing image size. Others may require advanced expertise. What’s nice is you can hide any of these more challenging tasks for later to help you stay focused on what you can do.
After your first report, you can then automate audits to run whenever you like and have them sent to your email.
2. Rank Trackers
Ranking and SEO are so linked that they’re basically synonyms! Raven includes a rank tracker to check your ranking for keywords for any set time frame.
You can track rankings in a variety of areas including by location, device, search engine, and more. Each plan consists of a certain number of keywords, but you can add more for the affordable price of just $.003 each.
3. Backlink Analysis
Backlink analysis is another feature you’ll commonly see in SEO solutions. Raven’s does use Majestic’s backlink database tools—one of the best out there. This an extra perk because other comparatively priced tools often use their own lower-quality backlink tools.
You’ll be able to dig up backlinks for up to 50,000 URLs to learn valuable information, including Trust Flow, type, anchor text and more. You can also find the kinds of spam links that can hurt your rankings.
One of the best features is seeing where your competitors are acquiring backlinks from and checking their quality against yours in the SERP evaluation. This is an excellent way also to uncover new backlinking opportunities and retool your approach.
4. Keyword Research
The right keywords will determine the success of any marketing campaign. Raven gives you information drawn from Google, Majestic, Moz, and Bing to show you search volume and ad data.
You’ll also be able to see similar search phrases and content marketing opportunities for keywords your competitors have not used.
Best of all, you don’t have to evaluate each keyword separately. Raven allows you to upload a CSV keyword document. Then you can organize based on filters, tags, and other categories. This makes keyword research much easier and more efficient.
5. Competitor Research
Aside from the backlinks tool, Raven has a variety of other ways to get information on your competitor. You can also check competing sites based on their quality, keywords, design, page speed, and more.
Raven will show you a side-by-side comparison to show how your site stacks up against your competition. It’s a great way to develop new marketing strategies that will help you out-rank others in your industry.
6. Social Media Management
One of the unique features of Raven is that it also includes social media management tools. You can integrate Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn into your dashboard. It’s most useful for scheduling posts and tracking analytics for your social channels.
It’s not as full-featured as Sprout Social or another major social media management app, but it is a handy feature and useful for organizing your complete digital marketing strategy in one place.
Who Should Use Raven Tools?
Raven is a good fit for small businesses looking to manage their own SEO as well as solopreneur and small agencies on a budget.
If you need one tool that does a solid job in most categories, it’s hard to beat Raven. On top of their main features, they also support email marketing and paid advertisement analytics. In these areas outside of primary SEO strategy, the features aren’t as strong, but they are useful and can help you save on software overhead.
Larger companies and agencies can also benefit from Raven though they may want to opt for dedicated solutions, particularly for social media marketing as well as email marketing.
Raven Tools Alternatives
Cora and Page Optimiser Pro are two popular Raven alternatives at different ends of the price spectrum. Raven’s main advantage is that it strikes the middle ground between affordability and functionality.
What Is Page Optimiser Pro?
Page Optimiser Pro is the paid version of Page Optimiser that focuses on on-page SEO and keywords. It doesn’t include anything for off-page, which is why you’ll still need a solution like Raven. But it’s an affordable and effective way to tune up your sites SEO quickly. Page Optimiser Pro starts at just $10 a month.
What Is Cora?
Cora is a full-featured app that tells you everything you need to know about site SEO. It looks at 2040 ranking factors (Raven is only 17) and, in order of importance, tells you how to fix them. It also adapts to Google updates helping you stay ahead of the curve. It doesn’t come cheap, though. The sole Cora monthly plan starts at $250/month.
Raven Tools | Page Optimiser Pro | Cora | |
On-page SEO optimization tool | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Ease-of Use | Easy | Medium | Hard |
Number of on-site ranking factors | 17 | 29 | Over 2000 |
Analyzes Multiple Metrics | Yes | No | Yes |
High-Quality Keyword Analysis | Yes | No | Yes |
Project Organization | No | Yes | Yes |
Social Tools | Yes | No | No |
Starting Price: | $39/month | $10/month | $250/month |
Is Raven Tools Worth It?
It depends. Whether you’re a small business focused on personal growth or a huge marketing firm, you do need SEO software to make sure you’re doing everything you can to improve your rankings.
Raven Tools is definitely a fantastic option for smaller firms and agencies with only a handful of needs.
However, as great as Raven Tools is, once you get to the more expensive Lead and Thrive plans, it’s time to review your options more thoroughly. At this cost, you might want to consider one of Raven’s competitors who offer more robust functionality at a similar price.
Pros
- Site Audit
- Collates multiple data points
- Easy to set up and use
- Includes report scheduling
- Affordable
- Great support team
- Social and email tools
- Integrates with other SEO tools
- Automation tools
- Competitor analysis
- White-label
Cons
- Limited report customizability
- Interface is a little clunky
- More webinars and videos would be helpful
- Need customization options for reports
Raven Tools: The Bottom Line
Raven Tools does a pretty job at many things. It’s not perfect, especially outside of its core area of the SEO audit and keyword research. You can get better information from even free options like Google Analytics.
But it does include a lot under one easy-to-use interface including social and email analytics. You’re not going to find this from any of their competitors. Overall, if you want one, affordable marketing tool, then Raven Tools is worth considering.
Give their free trial a shot to see if it fits well with your digital marketing needs.
Raven Tools Review
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Summary
Considering using Raven Tools as your SEO tool platform? Raven Tools claims to be an all-in-one platform. They include SEO reports, competitor research, and keyword research. Does Raven Tools stand up to their claims? Read our review to learn the truth about Raven Tools.