Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
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Linkdex Enterprise SEO Platform
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Linkdex Enterprise SEO platform from the UK company Linkdex is a cloud-based search engine optimization platform featuring integrated search visibility, market share, and content performance reporting and multi-channel campaign management tools with a focus on organic marketing. It touts data rich yet comprehensible reporting leading to actionable business intelligence.
Would-be users may book a demonstration for their company of this enterprise level, multi-national product. Based in London…
Clients who are selling products such as dresses, clothes, jewelry, beauty products, etc., generally work well. Also, in some cases, it doesn't fetch a good ROAS for very small business owners. If a client is already doing well in SEO, the probability for it to perform well over Google Ads is always enhanced, and if it doesn't have a good organic reach, Google Ads also suffers.
From my research, Linkdex is the least expensive enterprise SEO platform available. If you have a team of optimization specialists or you are managing SEO efforts for multiple clients, Linkdex is a perfect entry-level enterprise platform. If you are a solo practitioner managing a single site - even if you work at a multiple billion dollar organization - Linkdex may be TOO much for a single individual or a small team to handle, as you surely will not use the platform for its collaboration ability and not dive into certain areas on a frequent enough basis to make the cost justifiable.
Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).
Share of Search is awesome! It is one of the primary features we use and talks about with our clients and it always makes its way on to our monthly dashboards. Being able to assess your organic coverage in comparison with your competition is extremely focused and drives action.
Content 360 allows you to not only see areas which have SEO issues and how many keywords the page is ranking for, but it also integrates data from Google Analytics - showing engagement and value metrics. This lets you quickly assess whether you are going to optimizing a page that is trafficked frequently or if you are optimizing a page that no one cares about.
It is a comprehensive SEO platform. Linkdex incorporates not only base SEO tools like issue tracking, keyword rankings, etc., but its integration with Google Analytics and Search Console provide an even clearer picture - helping you prioritize your optimization work. In addition, it has content strategy tools within the platform to help you plan your next blog post or content update by sharing competitive analysis and showing online authors - so you know where to look and who to reach out to if you are link building.
While on-boarding was done relatively well, with recurring meeting and even the account rep logging into our account and doing some of the grunt work for us, Linkdex is a bit of a beast to setup and configure to get the full potential out of the platform. So you cannot expect to get immediate value out of it on day one.
Dashboarding and Report Generation capabilities could be better, as the visualizations are somewhat limited and lack filter abilities where needed. This can cause additional work of exporting data and manipulating it manually. Depending on scenarios, this could be solved using the API; however, for those don't want to go that route, this would create a gap.
Lack of integrations. It would be ideal to pull in additional data points beyond the out of the box Google Analytics, Search Console, and Twitter options. Facebook, YouTube, and other social media and marketing platforms would help make the data set more robust.
I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.
I suspect that Google Ads is not for the novice user. I told my 'Ad Specialist' that I was not the best on computers and apprehensive about my ability to maneuver the website. He told me on more than one occasion that "I work for you...I'm your sherpa...call me any time or send me an email"! The sales and service representatives for Google Ads are very well trained, though not much integrity. Despite that I told my Google Ad Specialist that my website was incomplete the ad was published live anyway! Beware that the 'talk' is good, but it ain't cheap!
We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with
Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.
Linkdex is truly an enterprise solution. We have had enterprise clients attempt to use Moz as an enterprise solution and it falls short. Specifically with the ability to add unlimited users to the platform and configure rights. The task management capability is also great to enterprise teams, as you can assign tasks and include comments around hypothesis or context as to why you are implementing an SEO solution. Being able to review when changes were made to a site and then measuring how rankings/traffic/engagement changed because of it, without having to use an SEO tool, Google Analytics, and Excel... it is all in a single platform. If you are a small organization or a single individual, that is the only reason, in my opinion, to choose Moz.
Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.
We were manually pulling data to provide a rough calculation of Share of Search before Linkdex. This process would take 3-4 hours per client, per month. With Linkdex, we would log in and see Share of Search... it was just there without any work. We were able to provide a better service to our clients by spending more time analyzing the data and less time cultivating it.
The relatively small investment from a monthly/quarterly tool budget perspective was great for us. At approximately $600 per month, it was so insignificant to the many clients we served that by staying in the same platform versus having to log in to multiple platforms, multiple times to see information across clients, we easily saved $600 in task switching simply from a login/logout perspective on a monthly basis.
The fact that the account rep would take some tasks off of our plate and go in and configure the system for us was great and saved our consultants time to bill the client doing additional activities, while still moving forward in configuring the platform.
