Google Ads vs. Linkdex Enterprise SEO Platform

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized