SEO PR TIPS

Trackur is pretty simple to use. You enter in your search term, fill out a couple of other criteria (exclude domains, text results, videos or images results) and here you go with a list of the sources that quote your brand name!

I try it for our agency WebCertain and filter the search asking it not to include results with the main company URL and unfortunately I am a bit disappointed with the results as it looks really messy…

I could not see some of the sources I get while doing a basic search on Google Web such as our own PR resource http://www.newscertain.com or on Twitter or LinkedIn in which the company is registered.

I also noticed that most of the links appearing on the listing do not lead you directly to the main article page speaking about your brand but, to a link to a page that has just a link on your brand name.

I explain myself more precisely with the example below:

The result underlined in red is a PR we wrote for a client and that has been published in one of the well known news service wires einnews.com. The link drives you directly to the article.

However, the result underlined in green directs you to a total different article not in relation with the one you are looking for – this because the page of this article just contains a link to the brand name. And then it’s not easy to see it when you don’t have a view of the cached page that you get from a Google search.

Briefly, you have to play around and check the listing to get at the end what you really want – but does that save you more time than playing around the web using Google search?

The good thing about Trackur is that you can share a result with a friend via email so that you can make him aware of a bad or a really good comment that appeared on a certain blog or site. Another good point is that Trackur gives you some notes on the influence of each website (views numbers, top discussion, traffic rank of the site) where your brand or article has been quoted to see the benefits of it. But I have to say I am not sure how this ranking worked… I assume that a higher number indicated more influence??? Also, I wonder if clients will understand or rate a Trackur rank, compared to Google Page Rank, or Alexa.

Unfortunately, it is a shame you can’t select the results you want to make appearing on the listing and share the whole listing of it with your company or clients (or is this option available in the paid version??) – I am thinking notably of yahoo search explorer that offers you the possibility to save your links listing results in an excel format…

A good thing nevertheless is that you can save your all searches within the site and set it up as a RSS feed and start monitoring what’s being said about your company.

Working for a multilingual company, I have to say as well Trackur is not the best tools to track results in any other languages than English. I try to assess the results for a French PR campaign I managed but none of the sources I can find while tracking through Google come up with Trackur…is Trackur supposed to be multilingual?

Conclusions and suggestions

I think that charging up to $197 a month (that is actually the price for the enterprise option) for the tool that doesn’t offer substantially greater benefit than Google Alerts is a bit too much…

The pricing model definitely seems aimed at businesses. I can somewhat understand this because I am sure the tool is a good resource, but need to some extent to develop more options to be perfectly well respected in my opnion…(dealing with more languages, keeping preferences for viewing search results, having the possibility to add notes to specific items, or the possibility to view results in summary or excel form…etc.)

I am looking forward how this tool will grow and see what can be the differences among the many other e-reputation metrics tools across the web…

I was also quoting in my last post the site Brandseye and Jenny just came up with some news about it thanks to her Twitter connections!!! Apparently this one would be multilingual…