We signed up for Raven a few months ago, although I have to admit that we didn’t really start digging into its features until recently. After working with it in a bit more detail, I thought I’d give a quick run through of what we’ve found so far.

For those who don’t know what it is, Raven is a web-based application for managing Internet Marketing campaigns. It’s a hosted solution, so there’s nothing to install, and it is either $79/month or $199/month depending on the number of users you’ll need. It has a whole host of features that you can check out on their website, but the three I’ll go over here are the SERP tracker, Link Manager, and Social Media manager.

SERP Tracker

Initially, we weren’t too impressed with the SERP tracker in raven, but we found that it’s important to let it run for a few weeks before you can really see the value here. You don’t get immediate results the way you do with a local application like WebCEO, but I’ve come to really like Raven’t SERP tracker, especially since it supports graphing of SERP history (pictured left)

Link Manager

Another feature we’ve been utilizing in Raven is the Link Manager, which provides a handy way to keep track of all the inbound links you’ve acquired or requested. It also has link monitoring so that it will let you know when a requested link becomes active, or if an active link becomes inactive.

Social Media Manager

This is a feature we just started delving into, but it’s pretty cool. Raven allows you to manage “personas”, which are accounts on social media sites that you’ve created for your clients. Especially interesting is the Twitter account manager, which provides a concise report of Twitter “key performance indicators”, including ReTweets and followers (the image to the left was taken from the user manual). Raven also allows you to perform brand management by tracking mentions of your client’s name – kind of like a Google alerts for social media – but admittedly we haven’t really investigated this feature too much.

Conclusion

So far, we’re digging Raven as a campaign management tool. We’re currently using it on the $79/month plan, which is a pretty reasonable price for what you get, though I do think that they could stand to give more than two user accounts at that price. We don’t have any relationship with Raven whatsoever, so this isn’t supposed to be a promotional post, I just thought I’d post some thoughts after using the package.

Tags: raven, seo, Tools

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.