This review is part of the SEO tools comparison report. View the entire report here.
In summer 2018, Authoritas hit the digital marketing industry headlines when it acquired Linkdex, a key competitor in SEO and content marketing SaaS.
Formerly known as AnaylticsSEO, Authoritas’ tech has earned a strong reputation among SEOs since 2009. We had a play around with Authoritas in 2019, to find out how the merger with Linkdex has improved the software’s offering.
Authoritas offers a wide range of tools to help with lots of different SEO activities, with a particularly strong offering in the content marketing department. As with SEM Rush, WebCEO Raven and MOZ, it gives you a single management facility for all your SEO activity.
SEO Reporting
When you log in to Authoritas, you’ll find yourself at a dashboard showing critical insights on your site’s search performance. It’s a customizable view, similar to the WebCEO’s dashboard, with the option to add widgets and dashes showing the data most relevant to your campaigns.
Underneath the dashboard is a reporting suite, set up to create reports in Excel and PDF. In the ‘Create Report’ area, can choose components to set in the report, such as link data and new links. Once you’ve added your selected components into the report, you’ll be able to generate, schedule and automate reports as required.
Project management
Authoritas features a project management facility, feeding into a section called ‘Campaigns’, which enables users to add and assign tasks to team members from numerous places throughout the tool. When doing this, you can also give levels of priority, which is very helpful for working as a team (ideal for agencies and large company SEO depts).
Keyword rank tracking
Rank tracking in Authoritas is packaged as ‘Visibility Explorer’ – a tool tapping into a database of 150 million keywords which are scraped, crawled and indexed once-monthly by Authoritas’ proprietary tech. Enter a domain name, and Visibility Explorer will show you how many keywords the domain ranked for, the number of ranked pages and its overall visibility score. It also gives an estimate of organic search traffic to the domain.
Ranking configurations can be set to hone tracking down according to search specifics such as location, search engine, device and language. Once you’ve chosen the settings for a ranking configuration, these can be saved and applied automatically. Heavy users will be pleased to hear it is possible to have multiple configurations running at once.
Other useful elements of Authoritas’ keyword tracking include tag analysis, which allows you to segment data throughout the platform by clustering keywords into groups. There is also the forecasting section, which shows the current estimated amount of traffic alongside the amount forecasted in the case of the domain achieving a higher keyword ranking. The forecasting functionality strikes us as a great way to hone in on where the low hanging fruit or priorities should be in terms of target keywords.
On-page Search Engine Optimisation
Authoritas’ on-page SEO offering is centred around the Content 360 area of the tool. Everything you’ll see here is based around a crawler, which starts at your site’s homepage and crawls its way through its architecture, filtering and flagging any issues it finds. These issues, which include server errors, 301s, duplicate content and broken links, will be familiar to users of other on-page optimization tools like those offered by Raven and WebCEO.
While Authoritas’ reporting of on-site issues is relatively standard, the Content 360 area does include a few unique features. When you click-through to a page where a problem has been identified, the tool shows you traffic information and other performance metrics for that particular page, which can be a great help in working out how urgently the on-page issue requires attention.
We also like how on-page optimization feeds into the Campaigns element of Authoritas. Its a good example of great user experience. When the tool finds an issue, you can then add that issue as a task and assign it to an individual on the team so they can help with your SEO efforts.
Link tracking
Of all the ways Authoritas has been strengthened through the acquisition of Linkdex, improvement to the tool’s link-tracking offerings could be the most pronounced.
The tool’s backlink tracking tool is particularly well suited to showing how influential each link is. It takes data from Majestic’s fresh and historic indexes, recrawls every link those databases provide and looks at factors such as domain age, site traffic and relevancy of content to determine the level of influence.
This tool can look at competitors’ domains as well as your own, providing an in-depth analysis of their backlink profiles. If you are prospecting for new sites you would like to link back to yours, applying Authoritas link-tracking to competing websites is a quick and easy way of doing that. Whenever you identify a promising domain that links to a competitor’s site, you can add it into the Campaigns area of Authoritas to be fed into your outreach workflow.
Once you have added a link into a campaign, you’ll be able to go to Campaigns and see the detail of the link, edit it, or update the status in progress of getting that link built to your domain.
When you mark a link as successfully, it can annotate itself back in the rankings area. The link is illustrated as a green triangle in the ranking data on the date the link was published, which is very handy for showing the effect of your outreach activities campaigns. If you need to report back to a client or manager on your link-building progress, this could be a useful aid for demonstrating ROI.
Author Discovery
Author Discovery is, in our opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of the software, based on another proprietary database of the software. When Authoritas crawls and indexes the ~150mn keywords used in its keyword tracking, it goes to every ranking page and pulls article authors through from the ranking content, into the Author Discovery database. What this amounts to is a way of finding influencers using SEO metrics, as opposed to social media vanity metrics.
Author discovery can find authors’ locations, the domains they are writing on, keywords they rank for, and links to their social media profiles. You can also click straight through to their content from the tool. If you find an author who could be a target in your link-building, you can add them to a campaign in the Campaigns section, to help with your team’s workflow.
Market Analysis tool
Authoritas’ Market Analysis tool can benchmark a domain against competing brands, based on the keywords it ranks for. The tool looks at a domain, sees how many keywords it ranks for in the top 3 pages of Google search results, then looks across the keywords the domain is ranking for and finds its top 100 competitors. It then plots you and your competitors on a quadrant chart, with Domain Strength and Organic Traffic as the axes. You can zoom in to find the most relevant/closest competitors to your domain, which we found helpful in creating a better representation of the audience targeted.
The Market Analysis Tool lends itself well to proactive use. It gives recommendations on how to optimize your content and enables you to do in-depth analysis by looking at specific keywords, analyzing your pages with high search volume, and tapping into a host of other filtering and sorting options.
There’s lots of further detail, you can look for within the tool, e.g. by comparing yourself with an individual competitor. In short, there’s plenty of analytical scope to understand what’s going on with a website’s competitors, and how they can be matched or beaten.
Price
Authoritas ranges from £99-1,499 per month. As with the other tools, the price difference is mostly connected to the volume of sites, keywords and links you need to monitor, so agencies with lots of websites will be looking at the MNE’s level plan (£1,499/month), which lets you run campaigns on up to 40 sites and monitor 14,000 keywords.
The Niche plan (£99/month), designed for Corporate websites and niche eCommerce sites that want to automate their processes, is limited in that you can only monitor five domains and 1000 keywords. However, this does mean the software is within reach of small businesses managing their SEO in-house. Although the vast number of tools and options within the software may be daunting at first, we think the walk-through approach to SEO campaigns provided by Authoritas could work well for this type of business. (See plans*)
Conclusions
Authoritas has improved on its predecessor AnalyticsSEO, which was impressive in its own right. The Market Share tool is a real USP, providing a unique way of understanding the keyword landscape and the players within it.
Go back to SEO tools comparison report.