Raven Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
The vast majority of the work I do with the software involves the diagnostic tools (Keyword tracking, technical site scan, domain metrics) and reporting. The diagnostic tools are fast and have all the information that I need to perform a site audit quickly. The reporting functionality can be a life saver - youo can easily apply logos and data points to the report and set them up to run automatically. This saves a lot of time for reporting and provides great detail to my clients on the progress of their site or paid campaigns.

Cons
Most of my gripes are nit picky items that I wish they would implement. I would like to be able to see over time information for domain metrics (domain authority, quality score, etc). This would make it easier for me to report growth and progress in those areas. The reporting also could use a little more flexibility - currently there is not the ability to add Users to Google analytics reports - for those clients that want to see how many individuals (vs sessions) view their site I have to find an alternative. Some of the stock reports also require some manipulation to provide meaningful visual data as well.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I really love the ease of use for the backlink explorer as well as the way the reporting dashboard feels and displays information. It really makes our small digital marketing company look that much more professional and increases our SEO workflow and productivity.

Cons
There doesn't seem to be a way to automate reports to show last month's data over the previous month, ie month-over-month automated reports. We've tried reaching out to support on this and haven't gotten anything back in regards to if this is possible or not. It seems like a basic thing to do as there are a ton of applications for continues month-over-month reporting that doesn't have to be manually set each month. This wastes a lot of time, especially when you have dozens of clients expecting reports on the 3rd of the month.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I like the ease it can do programatic site audits of websites to help with landing new customers as well as finding issues with current customers. We use Raven's reporting capability to generate our monthly Organic SEO reports for customers but we use another product to handle the PPC reports. I like the general reporting functions but need improvements here.

Cons
As mentioned we use Raven for our monthly Organic SEO reporting for customers. It does a good job of comparing month to month, but it does not do a very good job of showing a customers SEO trend over a period of time. For example, I would like to show simple graphs of various SEO metrics over a year such as how your Clicks and Conversions trended on a graph over a year. Or how much your traffic increased or decreased over a year. Or your average SEO ranking etc. That information is in a better format in Google Analytics than it is in Raven and I haven't found a way to pull that data for Raven and have it present in a way that is useful to someone to easily see the trend over a period of time. I can understand if it was a new customer and you had no historical information, but if I've been tracking Google Analytics data in Raven for a particular customer for 3-4 years and can't get to the historical info in a usable way, that's a problem. That's a very obvious data point to show customers and I can't get it from Raven currently (that I'm aware).

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
I really like how you can change the location, device & metrics, in the graphs to display different sets of information. The backlink explorer is really handy for checking to see if your getting credit for recently added backlinks. Repeating keywords to show how you are showing up in google SERPs is also very handy.

Cons
The errors for your website could be displayed better, or add a way to disable some errors. I have a few instances that say an external link is invalid when i know it is valid but there is no way for me to mark it as fixed or working. I wish the software had AMP related areas or a way to show if my AMP sites are organized correctly.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
reporting for google analytics and google ads, then the ability to schedule a monthly email with attached PDF of the last 30 days. handles a large number of clients quite well, which is important. And the abilty to import a template report layout to a new campagin/property has been extremely useful (the software would not be viable for us without it)

Cons
SERP reporting. This is a bit heart breaking - the feature is there, our testing indicated that the results were accurate, but then we try to test it with a real client and it doesn't work. I think the reports run fine, but the RAVEN user interface is not capable of extracting the data out, and nobody in RAVEN support can extract this for us into csv or anything upon request. We needed to shop around for alternatives due to this issue not being prioritised as something to fix. I know it's only in BETA, and I know you can't guarantee it, but it's something that puts my raven subscription into question if I can find another tool that can handle my SERP requirements better, and my google analytics reporting just as well. stay tuned in this race to the door!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10