Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

Covario – Organic Search Reviews

May 1, 2009

So, way back in December I wrote about some initial thoughts on Tools for SEO using Covario. I wanted to catch everyone up on my progress thus far.Since December, you would have thought I have had several months by now to talk about. Well, here’s what happens in a corporation: 1) you need legal to sign off and because it’s considered an “application” it takes even longer. Ok, long story short, here we are still in the “ramp up to launch” phase.The team we work with is very bright and helpful. I do appreciate the project plan and attention to detail they pay to our account. I have had to fill in an excel spreadsheet that includes up to 4 site sections, the one I am responsible for, corporate US site and I chose a competitor, who will remane nameless.You also supply your analytics login information for the purposes of reporting as well as where your XML sitemap is located, to be sure all URLs are crawled. I then put together a list of “gold” keywords that I selected and mapped to particular relevant pages in my site. I also supplied a list of my competitor’s gold keywords and their relevant landing pages. All in all the process was fairly simple and actually made you stop and really think about each keyword and best landing page for each. Something I don’t get a whole lot of time to do with all the other responsiblities I have on my plate.Covario will run it’s first audit against my site within the next week. I asked which block of IP addresses should be blocked from our WebTrends analytics so we don’t have to explain the huge spike in traffic that will hit that day. They provided me a list  of IPs to block and that was that.So far: The good – smart team, good process and project planning and The Bad: Takes a little longer to ramp up, which might not have taken so long had it not been for legal red tape. Pre-contract sign was really just a nuisance. I had a pretty frustrating experience during the sales process, there was a lot of confusing explanation and no way of getting into the “driver seat” and actually seeing the application run or test it out at all.Next update I enter information about the first audit and my overall experiences with the web based application.

Filed under: Covario, SEO Tools