Search engine optimization (SEO) platforms are perhaps the most powerful strategy to drive traffic to your website. Once you have determined that enterprise SEO software makes sense for your business, spend time researching individual vendors and their capabilities.
Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following:
- How do you calculate search volumes?
- From where is raw data extracted?
- Can this system track millions of searches, visits, site pages, etc.?
- Do you support international search?
- How do you track and report on SERP features?
- Does your tool help customers understand what competitors do and derive actionable insights from that?
- How robust and flexible are your reporting options?
- Where are the actionable reports?
- What other meta-information does your system collect that may be made available via API?
- Is there a workflow built in that allows us to coordinate the work of our marketing, content, web development and social media teams across the organization?
- What does the onboarding process entail and how long will it take?
- What kind of ongoing support and client engagement will your account team provide?
Knowing how the system treats information types will impact how you ascribe value to certain keyword terms, make decisions about keyword and content choices and affect the ROI of your search marketing efforts. Find out if the numerator in the calculation of the platform’s average clicks per search or average search volume is normalized for global or local (in that market) search and whether search ranks are calculated from within the country or remotely. The misapplication of international data could impact the ROI of your search marketing efforts.
You will want to know if and where your site was listed on the results page. For example, did your listing appear in web results, in Top Stories, in a carousel or the video results? That location and reporting feedback helps to quantify strategic and tactical efforts, which is especially important given that these SERP features can drive substantial or more-targeted traffic.
Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms. Click here to download!
