Advanced Web Ranking Review - Website Auditor

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is one of my favorite pieces of SEO software on the market today. It has been indispensable to me over the years. The software does it all and then some.

I reviewed it a few years ago; you can read that here, most of it is still relevant and I'll be updating it in the near future. In this post I want to highlight their Website Auditor tool.

Combining On and Off Page Factors

The beauty of this feature is the simple integration of on and off-page elements. There are other tools on the market that focus solely on the on-page stuff (and do a fantastic job of it) and AWR does as well.

The all-in-one nature of Advanced Web Ranking allows you to deftly move between the on and off (links, social, etc) page factors for a site (and its competition) inside of the Website Auditor feature. AWR has other tools built-in to go even deeper on competitive analysis as well.

A quick FYI on some general settings and features:

  • You can crawl up to 10,000 pages on-demand
  • All results are exportable
  • Audits are saved so you can look at historical data trends
  • Complete white-label reporting is available
  • Because it's software it's all you can eat :) (save for the page limit)

You can also set the tool to crawl only certain sections of a site as well as completely ignore certain sections or parameters so you can make the best use of your 10,000 page-crawl limit. This is a nice way to crawl a specific section of a site to find the most "social" content (limit the crawl to /blog as an example).

Interface Overview

Here's what the initial interface looks like:

awr-site-audit-interface-overview

It's a thick tool for sure, on the whole, but just focus on the Auditor piece. It's fairly self-explanatory but the top toolbar (left to right) shows:

  • Current site being viewed
  • Update date history for historical comparison
  • Filtering options (all pages, only specific pages (200's, 404's, missing title tags, basically all the data points are available for slicing and dicing)
  • Button for on-page issues to show in the view area
  • Button for page-level external link data to show in the view area
  • Button for page-level social metrics (Twitter, Facebook, G+) to show in the view area
  • Update Project button (to update the Audit :D )
  • Text box where you can filter the results manually
  • Auditor settings (see below)
  • Link data source, Open Site Explorer for now (Majestic is available in other areas of AWR and I'm told it will be available in Website Auditor as another option on the next release, 9.6 (due out very soon)

The tool settings button allows to configure many areas of the Auditor tool to help get the exact data you want:

awr-site-audit-tool-settings

On-Page and Off-Page Data Points

The on-page overview gives you all of what is listed in the viewport shown previously and if you click on the Filter icon you'll be able to look at whatever piece of on-page data you'd like to:

awr-site-audit-page-filters

I did just a short crawl here in order to show you how your data will look inside the tool. The view of the initial on-page report shows your traditional items such as:

  • Title tag info
  • Meta descriptions
  • Duplicate content
  • Robots and indexing information
  • Broken link and external link counts
  • Levels deep from the root
  • HTTP Status Code

Each page can be clicked on to show specific information about that page:

  • Links from the page to other sites
  • Internal links to the page
  • Broken links
  • External links pointing into the page with anchor text data, Page Authority, and MozRank. Also whether the link is no-follow or an image will be shown as well
  • Broken link and external link counts
  • Levels deep from the root
  • HTTP Status Code

The on-page overview is also referred to as the Issues Layout:

awr-site-audit-on-page-view

The other 2 views are more of a mix of on-page and off-page factors.

The Links Layout shows the following (for the root domain and for the sub-pages individually):

  • Levels deep from the homepage
  • Page Authority
  • MozRank
  • Linking Root Domains
  • Total Inbound Links
  • Outbound Links
  • No-follows
  • Inbound and Outbound Internal Links

awr-audit-links-overview

In this view you can click on any of the crawled pages and see links to the page internally and externally as well as broken links.

The Social Layout shows the following information:

  • Facebook Shares, Twitter Shares, and Google +1's for a given URL
  • Internal and external links to the page
  • Indexed or not
  • HTTP Status
  • Meta information
  • Broken Links

awr-audit-social-layot

This data is helpful in finding content ideas, competitor's content/social strategy, and for finding possible influencers to target in a link building/social awareness campaign for your site.

Reporting and Scheduling

Currently you can provide white label PDF/interactive HTML reports for the following:

  • Issues Layout
  • Link Layout
  • Social Layout

You can also do a quick export from the viewport window inside the Website Auditor tab to get either an HTML/PDF/CSV export of the data you are looking at (list of link issues, social stats, on-page issues, and so on).

Reports can be scheduled to run automatically so long as the computer AWR resides on is on and functional. You could also remote in with a service like LogMeIn to run an update remotely or use the AWR server plan where you host the AWR application on one machine and remote client machines (staff as an example) can connect to the shared database and make an update or run a report if needed.

Advanced Web Ranking's Website Auditor is one of the most robust audit tools on the market and soon it will have integration with Majestic SEO (currently it ties into OpenSiteExplorer/Linkscape). It already pulls in social metrics from Twitter, Facebook, and G+ to give you a more comprehensive view of your site and your content.

If you conduct technical audits or do competitive analysis you should give AWR a try, I think you'll like it :)

Published: May 30, 2013 by Eric Covino in seo tools

Comments

phpmoz
May 31, 2013 - 12:58pm

Is this a sponsored post? The product looks decent, but would like an unbiased opinion.

June 1, 2013 - 1:10am

this post was not paid for in any way by AWR.

I pay our employees to contribute, but we were not paid for the review.

We may at some point add affiliate links to some reviews, but this one wasn't even any sort of an affiliate review either.

Mishti
June 8, 2013 - 4:38am

I agree with Aaron wall. I do not know whether it may work well or not. Still I am in a search of a tool that helps me to generate reports as well as track my website traffic so that if any modifications needed, then I may do it. Recently someone told me about the colibri tool that helps to optimize the website completly. If anyone needs more information visit http://colibritool.com

claymore94
December 12, 2013 - 11:59am

I purchased a licence some time back but this software stopped working for me this month. I contacted the support team and I was informed "Google did some changes and we were forced to make the same change in our application with a search engine update, to get the results from them again"

In order to get the software functioning I was asked to but a maintenance plan for 89e (euro) for 12 months! The software wont work without the plan so I cant understand what the couple hundreds of euro buying the licence was for. Having to also play 89e p.a. seems like extortion.

Conor  

albertalbs
January 8, 2014 - 10:12am

Thanks for the review Aaron.
Looks like good among other SEO software. Downloding 30 days trial version.

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