SE Ranking is on a good track when it comes to rank tracking. It displays a graph of your average position over time which is helpful and it can also help you when it comes to identifying some basic SEO issues with your website. It boasts as an all-around SEO tool, which it definitely isn't because it lacks a link database to be your go-to tool for everything SEO. Its UI is not optimized for ease of use, thus offering sub-par user experience. It has two different interfaces for different SEO tools which, I hope, they can incorporate into one.
Viralheat is great for those who have to report back with hard numbers or proof backing a specific campaign or initiative. If this is important to you, make sure you ask to see examples for the monitoring and reporting features. Also, the amount of monitoring you do will impact your quote, so have that information in mind.
Simplicity: The software is very easy to use and took very little time to start optimizing my social media campaigns.
Set up time: I was up and running in no time. With social media you cannot wait days or weeks to get started. By having a quick start up process, it allowed me to get started ASAP.
Reporting: The foundation of all business decisions has been a very tedious process in the past. By using Viralheat, I save time on reporting and have better reports to give more actionable insights.
Data: Not only is the reporting awesome, there are many more insights you can get by using the large amount of demographic data that is in the software.
Some trouble that we ran into with Viralheat was with the daylight savings time change. All the posts that we previously scheduled out before the daylight savings ended up coming out late an hour. I thought Viralheat should have fixed this on their end and should have reached out to their clients about the time change and to tell us if we needed to change anything on our end.
I also want to see Pinterest and Instagram soon on Viralheat. I know this component is not entirely up to Viralheat, but seeing that Pinterest and Instagram are a big part of the social media game, I think scheduling out posts for both these platforms would benefit alot of community managers.
There are no other tools out there that offer an equivalent level of functionality for the cost. We continue to monitor the space to see if we can find a tool that includes paid digital marketing analytics, but all tools that include this functionality are 3-5x the cost. Viralheat continues to be the best value.
I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.
The support is great but they don't have 24/7 support. And time zones can also be an issue sometimes. On the other hand there are plenty of guides and videos around to get yourself started. I never really needed support for "big" issues. And the help I got was good enough.
The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.
SE Ranking was our choice based on the suite of features it offered compared to competitors as well as the # of projects you could manage. From a cost perspective, we feel it provides the most value for your money. Other SEO tools did not offer the lead generation features that SE Ranking offered as part of their monthly plan.
We selected Viralheat for a number of reasons but the biggest factors were because it had the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) for the features available and the fact that we only had to purchase one tool. During the selection process we demoed with a handful of other SMM tools but realized that we would need to purchase two or more subscriptions if we wanted to get what Viralheat was offering in one.
The website "health" report has allowed us to fix things that Google might find strange or cause us to lose rankings, which has been very helpful.
It's given us more visibility into what exactly our SEO management company is doing and how they are performing, and if things are changing or not. It's very easy to see right from the dashboard.
Being able to see how our competitors stack up against us has helped us know where to improve, what to focus on, and how to be even better.
