Raven Tools review
Last updated: April 2023
- Reporting
- Campaign management
- SEO auditing
What is Raven Tools?
Raven began life as a digital agency and, after using a variety of different tools and spreadsheets to compile reports for their clients, they decided to make the whole process easier and built their own online marketing reporting software.
Due to the success of the Raven software they now focus solely on developing it and adding new features.
Now Raven Tools is a very useful multi-functional SEO tool designed to help everyone from freelance SEOs, in-house SEOs and agencies of all sizes.
What does Raven Tools do?
Although it may have started life as more of an SEO reporting tool, Raven has now evolved into a feature-rich online marketing tool.
The reporting features are still the strongest though. Adding new clients and scheduling reports takes a matter of minutes, and the resulting reports (which you can brand with your own logo) are very professional.
Raven can be synced with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, so all that data is always at your fingertips and can be incorporated seamlessly into your reports.
As well as the great reporting features, Raven also has a suite of excellent SEO tools. The most useful of these is the SEO Website Audit tool, which provides an extensive report on the SEO issues of your site, including duplicate content issues, 404 errors, pages with low word count, images with missing alt tags and so on.
It offers a very granular view of your site, and allows you to get a quick and detailed overview of where you can start improving things – so it’s great for helping win new clients as well as keeping an eye on your current clients.
Raven also offers link building tools to help find, analyse, store and track your link building targets. These tools use both MajesticSEO and Moz data to produce a handy overview of link targets.
The link building tools aren’t as feature-rich as some dedicated link building and analysis tools, but they do a great job of getting you started on your campaigns.
Raven also has a suite of social media tools that help you manage accounts across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.
These tools help you to track and report on metrics across these social networks, as well as schedule updates and mine your followers for contact details.
On top of these tools, Raven also has a ‘Content Manager’ that helps you keep track of your content calendar and even order content to be written via the Textbroker network, and there is a PPC tool which basically just connects with the Google AdWords API.
These two tools are not as developed as the others, but they help to round off Raven Tools as a great ‘all-round’ online marketing toolset.
Who needs Raven Tools?
Basically, anyone who thinks they would benefit from keeping all their client's reports and metrics in one place would quickly find Raven becoming their ‘go-to’ tool.
On top of the great reports it can make, the Website Audit Tool will likely become your first port of call when analysing websites for potential SEO problems.
With unlimited campaigns and users, Raven Tools is great for all SEO practitioners – whether they work in a big agency or on their own as a freelancer.
How much is Raven Tools?
There are five different account levels for Raven: Small Biz, Start, Grow, Thrive and Lead:
- Small Biz - $49 per month
- Start - $109 per month
- Grow - $199 per month
- Thrive - $299 per month
- Lead - $479 per month
The different pricing plans provide different levels of access to Raven Tools. With the entry-level Small Biz package, for instance, you can only set-up two campaigns/domains, whereas with the Grow package you can add 80 campaigns/domains.
Good points about Raven Tools
As you would expect, the reporting tools within Raven are top-notch and probably worth the money on their own – especially if you currently spend a lot of time compiling client reports every week/month.
The reports are designed to include a lot of data, so it is usually necessary to create your own template to make sure your reports feature only what you need to see. Once that template is created you can use it across all your campaigns – which makes it very easy to set up and start running with new clients.
The Website Audit tool is also very good. It provides a great snapshot of a website and helps to quickly identify the areas that need attention.
Bad points about Raven Tools
The user interface can sometimes feel a bit unintuitive, and new users will probably take a while to get used to it. It’s no problem after a few uses, but it can be a bit clumsy early on.
Some of the tools within the Raven Tools platform are also slightly under-developed, especially the Content Manager and PPC tools – but these are expected to improve soon.
Summary
If you are looking for a tool to handle all your client/website campaigns, create detailed scheduled reports easily and audit websites then Raven cannot be beaten.
The backlink tools are also very useful – although they don’t offer the flexibility of a full link tool – and provide a great starting point for link building campaigns. The fact that you can store and manage your link building targets also eliminates the need for more spreadsheets, which is always a good thing!
- Reporting
- Campaign management
- SEO auditing
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About the Author
Luke Glassford is an SEO expert with over 15 years’ experience.
During his time working in SEO, Luke has set-up an SEO agency, worked as an in-house SEO for a major national company and managed his own successful SEO consultancy - using a lot of different SEO tools along the way!