Mission Impossible: The Perfect Tracking Tool

Looking for a mythical, cost-efficient rank tracking tool

[TechNoob]

Hello fellow Web Marketing Professionals! I come to you troubled, and seeking direction.

Our company has just paid our WebCEO bill, and it has recently taken over $2,100 from the account. We are a small, but growing SEM firm, and it is becoming a problem from a cost-effective standpoint to maintain this tool, although WebCEO is pretty good in its own right in many ways.

We are officially hunting for a tool that is capable of doing the following:

1. Unlimited projects/domains
2. Tracking hundreds to thousands of keywords PER project
3. Track Google, local Google, Bing and Yahoo
a. i.e. Local SEO campaign wants to track three locations for Google Fort Lauderdale, FL, Chicago, IL, and San Diego, CA
4. Exporting a PDF report that is capable of being branded
5. Filtering results by only displaying improved positions

The ultimate goal is to have a tool with all the rank tracking bells and whistles of WebCEO, for $500.

We currently sign SEO clients at a rate of 2 per week, and currently have 70 clients overall

Please advise.

[TechNoob]

It's worth noting that reporting is typically once a month, but WebCEO has run 963k queries because it tracks weekly - which doesn't matter because it is fixed cost per keyword.

[topr8]

... only slightly tongue in cheek ... why don't you focus on getting clients who realise those kind of ranking reports are mostly a waste of time anyway.
who cares about 100's of thousands of so called keyword positions ... the only metric that counts for ecomm clients is sales (for others it is sign ups or visits or whatever)

[tangor]

Welcome to Webmasterworld. Glad to have you.

Meanwhile, I like pie in the sky, too, just haven't found any. I know of no company or product which can produce what you described. As to your current info provider and their billing rates, I can't advise, particularly for a regional market as limited as specified. I can suggest that you, or someone in the company, learn how to read your server logs AND also has knowledge of data extraction (often called "data mining") to do your research IN HOUSE. I say this from the viewpoint of 70 clients, which might be too shallow a data point for the "mystical services" out there. The best these companies can do is project possibilities over large data ranges and time periods, seeking trends which may, or may not, apply to your core business. These things you can do in house based on who visits your site.

IF HOWEVER, you want to find out what the WEB USER is doing, then good luck. Even G, B and Y can't figure that out, regardless of how many algos they throw at the problem .... THOUGH they are in the cat bird's seat with the best info out there. General Trends, and User Steerage is useful for a multi-billions corporation, not so useful for a local, regional entity.

[TechNoob]

@topr8 - I couldn't possibly agree with you any more. I am a man who likes Analytics, and digging for proper metrics that define the success of a campaign properly, like sales, CTR or CR. I called this "Mission Impossible" because these marching orders from my CEO are extremely unrealistic, but I was taking a chance in the event there is something that ACTUALLY exists to satisfy his.... needs. I do understand his perspective of solidifying the "perceived value", but as you stated, we know what truly matters.

@tangor - I honestly would like to pursue Data Science further and learn a language like R or Python and be able to scrap/mine.

This is a Hail Mary attempt, because I do try to stay open-minded. I appreciate your feedback.