Back in Oct 2011 Google started turning off our search keywords. Instead of seeing our own site’s keywords, we became stuck with the very unhelpful keyword (not provided) in our analytics reports.
Without this data, we were essentially cut off from seeing the traffic we were getting from Google.
Knowing which keywords a user used to find your site and buy one of your products, or subscribe to your email list is extremely valuable info. With it, you can optimize your funnels for higher conversions.
Without it, you are essentially flying blind.
Enter RankReveal, a new service by Daniel Tan, the creator of the very popular SEOPressor plugin. What RankReveal does is uncover all the keywords your sites are ranking for on Google (and Bing).
It also functions as a rank tracking tool so you can monitor your keyword rankings over time.
When I first got the email from Daniel about the product, I was super excited about the possibilities and purchased a subscription sight unseen. It’s the type of service I’ve been waiting for for a long time.
After a month of using it, I think I can now provide a solid review of how it has worked for me. There’s a lot to like about it, but there is also some room for improvement as well.
I will go into all of these in my RankReveal review.
How It Works
The main purpose of RankReveal is to discover the keywords that your site is ranking for. On the sales pages you will find buzz words thrown around like Reverse Rank Tracking technology and Ranking Graph.
It’s all a little vague and fluffy sounding, but what it means is that Rank Reveal is completely dynamic, and will continually monitor your projects and “reveal” keywords as it finds them.
The question is, does it work?
Well that’s easy enough to test.
What I did was add a couple of my sites to RankReveal to see what kinds of keywords it would find.
I’ve done no SEO whatsoever with each of these sites, so I did not have a great handle on what keywords they would be ranking for.
The first site I added was JustRetweet.com.
According to my Clicky stats, over the past month the site received 5,305 visitors from the search results. Out of those, 4,975 show up in my reports as (not provided). That’s 93.7% of my keywords not available to me.
The second site I added was DropMyLink. Over this same time period I received 3,547 visitors from search and 3,477 showed up as not provided. That’s a whopping 98%.
When you login to your RankReveal account you will first see your Dashboard. Here, you get a nice summary overview of all the projects you have created and can quickly see at a glance the keywords you have in the Top 3, Top 10, and Top 100 of the search results.
It also shows you the total keywords RankReveal is tracking and any new potential keywords it has found.
This is important, because the number of keywords you have access to is limited by the subscription plan you are on.
To start, you will need to press the Create Project button.
You will be asked to give your project a name, the url of your site, and some keywords (minimum 1) to seed your project. You can then choose which search engines you want RankReveal to track.
Google US is on by default, but you can also choose 175 countries covering both Google and Bing to track if you like.
Once that’s done, Rank Reveal will go off and start doing its magic. What I’ve found is that for most sites, it takes at least a couple of minutes to start returning any results at all.
What I normally do though is just add my site, and then come back in a couple of hours to see the results.
My Results
What I found with both my sites, is that RankReveal will definitely uncover a LOT of keywords. With both sites, it came back with over 100 keywords for both and I’ve gotten way more than that when I tried with a few of my other personal sites.
One caveat though.
Many of the keywords that RankReveal will discover for you are what it calls Potential Keywords. These are “Keywords revealed by RankReveal with no rank data available or rank outside top 100.”
It’s a little hard to evaluate the usefulness of these keywords because I don’t know how the system came up with them. Are they just related to the keywords that I am ranking for? It seems that way, but I don’t know for sure.
That said, RankReveal will return useful, actionable keywords for you to use.
Here are some of the keywords JustRetweet that it found
And here are some of the keywords for Drop My Link that RankReveal found.
As you can see there are definitely some good keywords in this list, and I can do a lot with this data.
For example, I can do further keyword research to evaluate traffic and keyword difficulty and try to do a little SEO optimization on these sites to bring even more organic traffic.
Or try thinking outside the box a bit.
You could use RankReveal on advertiser sites and use the keywords found as potential targets for a PPV campaign.
These are all great ways to use this service, and if you take action with this data, RankReveal will be well worth investing in.
RankReveal Interface
The current RankReveal interface looks nice, but is still fairly basic. When looking at your project data, you can filter using some predefined time periods (last 24 hrs, last 7 days, last 30 days) or choose a custom time period.
Along with your keyword you will see the url that the keyword ranks for, the locale, ranking, and ranking change over the selected time period.
Each column in the table is sortable, so you can easily see your highest ranking keywords for example.
As a rank tracking tool, RankReveal does a decent job. You can filter results over certain time periods to see your ranking changes.
If you click on the magnifying glass by each keyword, you will see a chart showing your rankings for that keyword over time.
Another nice feature that is not immediately obvious, is that clicking on the magnifying next to the url will display a chart showing all the keywords rankings over time for that url.
RankReveal Pricing
To use RankReveal, you will need to purchase a subscription, and there are several plans to choose from. Basically they all offer the same features. The only difference is the number of keywords you can track at one time.
The Starter plan, for example gives you a quota of 200 keywords for $19 a month. From my experience, this will allow you to realistically track 1 or 2 sites with this plan. The Basic plan gives you 800 keywords for $69.
One thing to note, is that when going through the sales funnel, you will be made a One Time Offer (OTO), which is an additional flat fee for a boost to your keyword quota. If you are planning on being a long time RankReveal customer, I think it’s worth looking at.
RankReveal Cons
RankReveal does do exactly what I want it to do, which is uncover keywords for my site that I didn’t know I was ranking for. However, I have a couple of suggestions to make it better and more useful.
Needs better keyword filtering options – Currently you can only filter by Your keywords and RankReveal keywords which is a bit limiting. I’d like to see the ability to filter by the non-ranking keywords.
Otherwise, trying to delete them because you are close to or above your quota becomes a tedious task as you need to select the keywords one by one.
Unable to Export Keywords – The biggest negative though with the current version of RankReveal though is that there is currently no way to export your keywords out.
Allowing us to export our keywords would make RankReveal infinitely more useful. We could then import this keyword data into other tools for keyword research, link building and even paid traffic purposes.
In my opinion, this was such an oversight that I emailed RankReveal support about it.
This is what they said:
Hi Chris,
We have plans to do this and it is on the high priority list. It should be enabled between April to May, during our upcoming release.
So export is in the pipeline which is a good thing.
However, I’m an impatient sort of person and since it’s not there now, I did a little bit of experimenting on my own to figure out what else I could do.
After trying out a couple of possible solutions, I hit on a way that works very simply!
With a couple of clicks, I can export all my RankReveal keywords into a .csv file which I can then open up in Excel. This method works great and is applicable for other contexts as well.
I’m very happy about this, as it has made RankReveal much better for my own business. If you want to learn more about how to do this, make sure to continue reading this review to the very end…
Final Thoughts
RankReveal is one of the more exciting, new products to come out in 2015. Google has locked away our keywords for a very long time, and it’s great to finally have a solution that will give us these keywords.
While the initial version might not be perfect, since it is a web-only service, you can expect to see continual updates in the future.
How RankReveal works now, may be very different from how it works a year for now.
My RankReveal Bonus
Instead of offering some random, over-inflated grab bag of random IM goodies for my RankReveal bonus, if you buy through my link I will teach you exactly how you can export your keywords form RankReveal.
It’s a short PDF report with easy, step by step instructions. The method is free and anyone will be able to implement it.
To claim your RankReveal Bonus, follow these simple steps
Step 1: Buy a RankReveal subscription using THIS LINK
Step 2: Email your receipt using this contact form or to chris at misterfong dot com. Make sure to include the subject line RankReveal Bonus.
Step 3: I will send you your bonus PDF within a 24 hours, just in time to export the keywords from your first project. :)
Hope you enjoy
Chris
