gShift (discontinued) vs. Linkdex Enterprise SEO Platform vs. RavenTools

gShift's pace of development is pretty amazing and they are very responsive to enhancement requests and other feedback on their solutions. gShift is well-suited for an agency environment where multiple clients need the basics in keyword rankings and website analytics and PPC reporting integration. gShift is less suited for a large organizations with multiple properties or web presences that are all integrated but require silos for reporting purposes or any type of parent-child reporting relationship that necessitates reporting at the property level as well as summarized reporting for all properties.

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

If you are looking for a one-stop shop for MOST things related to digital marketing, RavenTools is a great solution. You will be able to monitor social media, Google tools, email campaigns, and much more from one spot. It really cuts down on time spent moving from account to account. If you are looking for clean and easy to read reports for clients, RavenTools is perfect for that as well. It provides tools and reports that can be used by internal and external teams alike.

• Bringing most of your applications to one platform.
• Managing Gmail Accounts.
• Bringing all your communication channels to one spot.
• Easy setup and account integration.

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

• RavenTools has teamed up with SEO services like Moz and Magestic SEO to provide detailed data about the SEO health of your own websites as well as how they compare to your competitors' websites. I can directly compare number of backlinks, page speed, domain authority, integration of Google Analytics, presence of robots.txt files, on-site social media engagement, and home page load time. This a great way to get an idea of how your site stacks up against others and what can be done to improve it.
• RavenTools' automated reports are mostly great (I'll cover the negatives later). You can create reports with as much data as you would like and schedule them to arrive as often as you would like. I have SEO, social media, and site performance reports delivered to my team and me every Monday covering the last 10 days, and a broader quarterly report arrives in the inboxes of a few executives once a quarter.
• RavenTools' graphs are often easier to read and decipher than graphs found in Google Analytics. Part of the reason is the graph height. Google Analytics graphs are fairly short, so it's difficult to see smaller variations in the data. Those variations are more pronounced within RavenTools using the data.

Incentivized

• Minor bugs and defects are an ongoing issue - for example, PDF export capability for custom dashboards seems to be down frequently. While these type of defects are always resolved in 1-2 weeks, the fact that some of them keep reoccurring is an ongoing frustration.
• Custom Dashboard functionality is limited to pre-set defaults as far as what data points or "beacons" as gShift calls them, that you could pull.

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

• The data it gets from Webmaster Tools and Analytics is great and reporting on it is easy - however, when you're looking at the charts for keyword placement on screen the graphic can be hard to read and often I find myself just checking GWT and BWT separately for easier information if no report needs to be generated.
• RavenTools comes with an iPhone app so you can check on your campaigns and clients when you're not at your desk, however, the app crashes quite a bit when you get to the Google Analytics portion of the screen.

Incentivized

A year ago or so, Raven abandoned many of their organic rank reporting tools in an attempt to favor some Adwords intelligence. The market rebelled, as did I; in our desperation to find an alternative to Raven, none could be found and a great majority of users didn't want/need Adwords data. Months later, Raven reverted. I'd renew with Raven not just because nothing else cuts it, but because they are both trying to innovate, and listening to customers.

Certain areas, Social Media scheduling, could stand to undergo a complete overhaul. However, most of the RavenTools interface is easy to use. You will not have any issues getting up and running and should there be an issue, the customer service is really good. They also continue to preform updates that make the usability even better

RavenTools has some of the best Customer Support I have ever received. They are quick to respond and will keep you posted on the progress of your issue. You truly feel as if you are getting customized service. No human is perfect and I have had one situation in which I had to reach out multiple times, but overall I fully trust and approve of their process

They are very different tools can't compare them.

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

I don't have a lot of experience with other tools although we have had a lot of demos of other products. We have often found that by utilizing features in Raven that we didn't know about we could have the same functionality without using another reporting tool. This allows us to continue using one integrated reporting tool.

• We have been able to identify other keyword ranking opportunities and increase our on-site conversion rate.
• gShift has helped us prioritize content and discover content that is over-performing, and better optimize that content and use it for remarketing purposes.

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

• RavenTools has been invaluable in helping us improve ranking through website audits. The ease with which we can correct issues once they arise has resulted in approximately 35% increased productivity from our audit team.
• It would be helpful if the reports were nice enough that they could be customer-facing. We have to put the data into our own reporting forms for customer presentation.

Incentivized