As it turns out it offers an absolutely immense set of tools with which to find and monitor keywords. If anything I think that the actual amount of information available might even be overwhelming. I must admit to being a bit of a shoot first read insructions later kind of person when it comes to any type of software but in this case I learned pretty quickly that I needed to read the tutorials in order to make full use of the software. It offers many different options in terms of both searching capability and also report generation for various things. I particularly like the ability to have triggers which will notify me if any rankings or other items change in a non desireable way. For example I can setup a trigger for one of my client accounts which will keep an eye on current top rankings which leaves us free to work on new ones without the constant concern that some older ones have dropped down. then if any drops are noticed an email is sent out to notify us and we do a quick piece of work to reinstate that #1 ranking and move back to the current project.
The same can also be done for improvements in rank also. i can define a trigger which will alert me if one of the current keywords we are optimising for reaches the first page or top 5 etc. the current small project based approach we have to optimising work s with this very well as it means each small project we do has several small phases. Once a keyword reaches top 5 we stop doing active link building at that point and just monitor as more and more of the links we have built over the previous weeks / months are indexed and result in better rankings again. then once we are happy that things have settled down enopugh we may reactivate the project for a short period to boost those last few positions up to number 1 and follow this by adding a new trigger to keep track of the top ranks and alert us if any drop any positions.
This feature alone gives us much more control over our clients rankings and lets us keep a much better track of everything we do as one of the main issues with SEO is keeping an eye on possibly thousands of keyphrases for mutiple customers each day.
Add onto that the ability to easily search some huge amount of different search engines plus nice additions such as Google universal as well as Google uk without universal search etc.
There are some other great tools built into AWR as well including some quick site analyzers which gives you a very quick and simple overview of how well a site is optimised for a current keyword and a quick look at the current top 3 rankings for comparison. It has some similarities to the IBP top 10 ranking checker but this quick tool takes seconds to return some pretty useful info if you are on the phone to someone or just need to take a glance to ensure that your advice has been followed for a site after making recommendations. I also find that IBP while providing some quite useful info goes a little over the top in my eyes and sometimes takes longer to achieve what AWR can achieve in less than 1 minute.
In addition to the AWR system when you install it you also get Advanced Link Manager which works again on the same lines as Arelis does for IBP. It finds link partners and provides ways for you to contact them. It also tracks very accurately the current links to both your sites and any competitors sites so that you can get a good idea of your current competition and how difficult it might be to overtake them in the rankings. it effectively gives you everything you need to begin an accurate link building campaign following a proven route which is often what is missing.
From finding current referrers (you can add these manually as well) and automatically searching yahoo for current backlinks it then spiders the sites to gather info about them and make choosing potential link partners as well as actually getting these link partners very simple. As most of you will know link popularity is one of the biggest factors for SEO still and ALM provides a great link manager.
Once you have gone through the process of getting a list of current unverified referrers for a site, so called because these people may no longer link to a site but they have done at some point when the search engines last visited that site, you can then process this list and the remaining will be verified referrers who we know do actually currently link to the site. You can then find out some pretty advanced information including the amount of outbound links from the specific page and with the latest update to 7.5 it also provides a link into your SEOmoz API account which gives access to another set of great stats regarding the general rank of a webpage in terms of both backlinks and overall authority.
Both of these tools make a great addition to any arsenal and I imagine very soon we will be seeing a lot more SEO professionals using Advanced web ranking and Advanced link manager to manage their campaigns more effectively.
