RankSense prides itself in offering only the most useful tools for your SEO projects, made up of 12 software modules. The other large suites STILL pack legacy modules, such as site submission, that just aren't useful any more, but RankSense has been brave and cut the crap.

All the elements that you'd expect are there. Keyword research, link analysis, rank reporting. An interesting deviation from the norm is that RankSense have decided not to include their own traffic and conversion tracking system (as Web CEO does), but instead provide log stats and Google Analytics integration. Where I wouldn't use a proprietary system, I would linked my Analytics account to the software in order to increase it's reporting capability.

The program provides a step-by-step SEO wizard to take a novice through every stage of the SEO process, or the tools can be used independently by more advanced users. While the tools are moderately powerful, they are too slow and cumbersome to be used across multiple sites easily and so the suite is more suited to the beginner or webmaster rather than the SEO professional.

My initial assessment of the program can be summarised as follows:

1. The initial tool that analyses traffic stats to pick up keywords already being used to find a website didn?t work. The report took at least an hour to run and was full of totally meaningless keywords. I could have found the same information within 5 minutes by looking in Google Webmaster Tools or Analytics. While I agree that it's often a good idea to look at keywords already drawing in traffic and build on them, from an SEO consultants point of view this feature adds little value for me.


2. By taking the "Smart Mode" route, you will be running a lot of reports before getting to the action. Again this is good for the novice but not for the more advanced.


3. In general, the software is extremely slow. In conjunction with point 2, this makes the whole process rather tiresome.