Now that we have smart phones it matters less and less whether you are sitting at your desk or not. Even when we are far away from the office, as long as we have a 3G signal then we can still be productive.
There are certain pieces of information that every SEO specialist needs to be able to access and as Apple always tell us “There’s an App for that”. Here is a list of my five favourite Search Engine Optimisation Apps for the iPhone.
1. Ego App by Garrett Murray
Ego is a very useful app that can give you a quick breakdown on the number of visitors to a site. You start by adding widgets that can for any of the following:
- Ember
- FeedBurner
- Google Analytics
- Mint
- Squarespace
- Tumblr
- Vimeo
For example you can see how many visits you have had to your site today, yesterday, this week, this month and this year. You can also see if your feed is more popular than it was the previous day. With a Twitter account it will tell you how many followers you have, how many people you are following, how many tweets you have posted, the number of favourite tweets and how many times you have been listed.
The best thing about Ego App is that it is very clear and you can see what is happening across a multitude of sites/accounts.
For me I like to use Ego to see if I can spot anything that is changing quickly on a site. For example if I suddenly notice that traffic to one of my sites has doubled I can then use another app to look in more detail at why this might be.
2. AnalyticsPro by Thomas Blackburn
This is probably the nearest you will get on your iPhone to actually being logged into Google Analytics. You start by signing in with your Goggle Analytics credentials and you are then shown a listing of all the sites that you manage.
You then have various reports that can be run such as summaries for today, yesterday or the last 28 days. There are visitor reports that can tell you information like the location of your visitors, the language they are using, the browser and operating system, visitor loyalty even the connection speed. There are traffic source reports that tell you how people have arrived at your site and what keywords they were searching for to find you. It can help you monitor your AdWords campaign and show you what has been the most popular content on the site.
Although you cannot generate your own reports as you can within Google Analytics itself there are so many reports to choose from that it will probably enable you to get enough information to manage with until you are back at your desk.
I find that I tend to mainly use the Summary, Location, Traffic Source, Keywords and Top Content reports and from this I can field questions from my clients when I am out of my office.
3. Serps by Hans Schneider
The Serps app allows you to check your Google rankings for particular search terms. It is very easy to configure. You simply enter the domain that you want to check and then click on the domain and add the search terms that you want to check. As you add a search term it is automatically ranked as long as it is within the first 100 results.
You can then click on the search term and you are presented with the top 100 results for that particular keyword phrase so that you can not only see where the domain you are interested in ranks but also who is beating it.
There is nothing to stop you from inputting a competitors site either, so you can keep an eye on what they are up to.
Serps is a free app.
4. SEO Pro nxfx.mobi
This utility gives you a site’s Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, number of inbound yahoo links and how many times the site has been dug on Digg. With the free version you can only add one site whereas with the full version you can add numerous sites. There is another built in function and that is to see the meta data that is stored in the page head. Finally for this app it has a built in browser that will display the page.
5. SEO Stats Keith Greene
SEO Stats provides details on the page rank of a site as SEO Pro does but what it also provides is a breakdown of the type of links that are pointing to the site. I am sure that I do not have to tell you how important inbound links are to a site if you want to gain a high ranking on Google.
With this app you cannot save a domain, you have to type it in each time that you want to use it. One of the ways I have found it to be useful in the past has been when you inadvertently start talking to a prospective lead and you have no PC, laptop, iPad or net book to hand. With this app I can still ask the person for their domain name and in a matter of moments I can find out how many inbound links they have got and how big a job it is going to be to get them to that coveted number one spot on Google.
Being on the iOS platform each of these apps are well designed and have a clear and intuitive User Interface. I find that between them they have helped to make my Search Engine Optimisation efforts just that little bit slicker and help me to be more productive even when I am out of my office.
Do you have any SEO apps that you would recommend? Leave a comment and let me know which your favourite SEO app is.
