The Raven Internet Marketing Tools Manual
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Introduction
Raven Internet Marketing Tools is the most complete online marketing toolset in the market. From link building to social media monitoring, this toolset will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. This guide is meant to be a reference to those looking to improve their familiarity with Raven so that they can maximize its value.
If you haven’t done so already, sign up for their free 30 day trial. I’ve been using Raven for over a year now, but it didn’t take me long to recognize the improvements it made to the campaigns I was working on.
Table of Contents
| I. Getting Started | V. Social | IX. Admin |
| II. Research | VI. SERPs | X. Coming Soon! |
| III. Links | VII. Analytics | XI. Conclusion |
| IV. Content | VIII. Reporting |
After you’ve signed up for your 30 day trial (or if you have an account already) there are two Raven properties you need to become familiar with: your dashboard and your toolbar.
The Dashboard
Your profile dashboard will look something like this:
Your dashboard will show a list of the websites you’ll be using with Raven within a particular profile. A profile is a grouping of websites to keep you organized. I have different profiles for work and personal websites. You could also setup profiles for different clients, or any way that will keep you organized. The profile you’ll be using the most should be set to the default profile (you can edit this under the Profile Settings) It is the profile that will always be displayed when you login to Raven.
Let’s take a look at each component of the dashboard. At the very top of the dashboard you’ll see a handful of useful buttons. I’ll go into more detail as to what can be done with these, but first let me give you a general idea of what role they play in Raven. The button on the top left is your Inbox (labeled “A” in the diagram). Here you can send and receive messages to and from other users of your Raven account. To the right of the inbox is your Tasks (labeled “B”). This is where you’ll be able to keep track of your to-dos, and the tasks you assign to other users of your account. Finally, the Contacts button (labeled “C”) will take you to a directory of people you’ve added through the link manager. I’ll go in more detail about this later in the guide.
On the top right corner of the dashboard you’ll see two drop down menus. The drop down menu on the left (labeled “D” in the diagram) is the website you are currently working with. The drop down menu on the right (labeled “E”) is the current profile you are using. You can quickly switch between websites and profiles using these.
The next section of the dashboard displays the name of the profile you are working on, and the websites you’ve added to that profile:
Finally, you can edit your profile details under the profile settings. Here you can change the name of your profile and set the profile to be your default profile.
The Toolbar
The Raven toolbar is the only “SEO” toolbar that I use. You’re probably saying, “what?!” but once you master the power of the Raven toolbar – you’ll see all the others as futile, as I do. Except the Web Developer Toolbar, that one rocks!
Let’s take a look at the 10 buttons on the Raven toolbar. Again, becoming familiar with the toolbar will quickly make Raven more efficient for you.
The first button titled “Raven” (labeled “A”) will take you to your dashboard. The “Add Link” (labeled “B”) is a quick way to add the page you are viewing to your link manager database. I’ll go into much more detail on this later in the guide.
The “Personas” drop down menu allows you to quickly log in and out of any social profiles you’ve setup within Raven. You can setup as many persona accounts as you’d like. If you have personas setup for multiple clients, this provides you an easy way to login quickly. Each of these little time savers add up quickly, don’t be fooled. I’ll go into advanced persona use later in the guide.
The analyze button on your toolbar gives you quick access to the page analyzers that are incorporated within Raven. This includes a quality, design and keyword analyzer which we’ll dive into greater detail later.
The next two menus to the right of the Analyze button allow you to quickly change which profiles and websites you are currently working with. No need to head back to your dashboard if you decide to move on to another project, the toolbar gives you access to just about all of the dashboard’s features.
Raven also gives you quick access to check for nofollow links. It’s pretty straightforward as you only have two options: Dofollow Links and Nofollow Links.
The final component of the Raven toolbar you need to know about is the “Activity” button (see above). When you turn Activity on it will record everything you do in Firefox. This function is most important when you outsource link building. It gives you a way to ensure that the person/company you outsourced to are doing what they’re told.
The “Research” component of Raven covers a variety of SEO needs. There are four major components to the Research tool. Let’s go through them and see how they apply to your Internet marketing strategy.
Quality Analyzer
The quality analyzer takes all of the labor out of getting a quick analysis of a website’s strength. I use it to get an idea of the quality and authority, one of my client’s websites has, when I initially engage in a project with them. It is also a great tool for researching competitor’s websites or determining if you want to link or request a link from a website.
To use the tool, simply enter the domain you want to be analyzed. Alternatively you can select the Quality Analyzer from the Analyze button on your toolbar and it will automatically generate a report for the website you are currently viewing.
The quality analyzer will calculate a score out of 100 based on the following components:
- The number of pages indexed in Google
- The number of pages indexed in Yahoo!
- Links to the website in Google
- Links to the website in Yahoo!
- The number of .edu websites linking to the site you analyzed (according to Yahoo!)
- The number of .gov websites linking to the site you analyzed (according to Yahoo!)
- The domain age
- The domain expiration
- Google PageRank
- Alexa traffic rank
- DMOZ listing
If you’re like me, you typically pull almost all of this data at the beginning of an engagement with a client. Raven also gives you the option of downloading the report as a PDF.
Keyword Research Tools
Raven integrates three popular keyword research tools in their toolset. You’ll have access to:
- Wordtracker
- SEMRush
- AdWords keyword tool
Any keywords that you are interested in targeting can be added to your SERP tracker. You can also export the keywords you are tracking in the SERP tracker.
What is great about this feature of Raven is that you never have to leave your dashboard to do any of your research. Quickly find keywords you want to target and track all within the same interface. This saves you a considerable amount of time manually researching and adding keywords to an Excel document.
Design Analyzer
The Design Analyzer is a report you can run for code and design analysis of a website. Just like the Quality Analyzer, it provides a quick and key insight into important search engine ranking factors related to the way a website is built.
You can quickly run the Design Analyzer for any website that you are currently viewing in your web browser via the Raven Toolbar, or by accessing the Analyzer under the Research tab of your Raven Dashboard.
The Design Analyzer analyzes the following components of a website’s design:
- Semantic structure
- Page content
- Obsolete and deprecated HTML
- Styles
- Download size/time
- Outgoing links
Again, this is a great way to get a quick insight on how well optimized the structure of a website is that you are either working on or want to work with.
Keyword Analyzer
The Keyword Analyzer provides insight into how well the content of a website is optimized in general or for a particular keyword. I find the tool most beneficial when you actually give it a subject/keyword to check against.
When accessing the tool via the Raven toolbar, a popup will appear for you to enter a subject/keyword but it is completely optional. The Keyword Analyzer will provide you with a list of related keywords (synonyms) for the subject you entered. This is a great way to quickly expand your keyword list, for competitor research and also determining how relevant a website is that you want to either link to or get a link from.
If you are interested in targeting any of the keywords it returns, you can add them to your SERP tracker to begin monitoring their performance.
The link management and building features of Raven are one of its most valuable assets. Link building is one of the most time consuming SEO processes, but it is critical to invest the time in it. Raven will help you cut out the admin time spent in your link building activities. Let’s dive in and see what exactly Raven has to offer here.
Link Manager
The link manager is amazing and you will love it forever because you no longer have to keep track of your links via Excel. The goal of the link manager is to create a database of any links that you are interested in requesting or have requested. That statement doesn’t do it justice, let’s look at how it does those things.
When you find a website that you want to create a link to, all you need to do is click the “Add Link” button on the toolbar. Once you have done so, the fun begins! Raven will bring up the following popup:
The add link window gives you a number of options. The status of the link gives context around what stage in the link request process the link is at. It can be set at any of the following stages:
- Queued (saved for later)
- Requested (requested but not active)
- Active (link is currently active)
- Inactive (link is no longer active)
- Declined (the equivalent of Joanna Lord saying “Get outta my face!”)
You can also select the type of link you’ll be requesting. The link can be:
- User submitted (manually added)
- Content exchange (distributed content)
- Paid (permanent link with a onetime fee)
- Paid (temporary link that you are “renting”)
- Blog comment (left a comment on a blog)
- Organic (naturally occurred)
- Indirect/Other (anything else)
The “Link Text” field should be filled in with the anchor text you plan to get with the link or that you want to associate the link with. The “Link URL” field should be setup with the web address of the link you want back to your website (so if it is a page other than the homepage, specify it here). You can add more than one link URL to the record.
“Tags” can be used to describe a link which will help you search your database looking for links you’ve added for a particular topic (e.g. adding the tag “good looking” and “awesome” to links to any of my websites).
The “Link Status” feature is life changing. If you check the box, once a month Raven will investigate the link to determine if it is still active, if it has changed location, if other links have been added to the page, if the anchor text has changed, or if the website’s PR has changed. This is very valuable information for paid links, in particular.
The “Assign Task” field is fantastic if you are working with a team to build links. You can assign a specific link to a person(s) in your team that puts them in charge of obtaining it. You can even setup the task priority, a due date and a description with any instructions for them.
Under the “Website Details” section of the form you’ll fill out any of the fields that haven’t been automatically populated for you (the location URL, website name, quality score [if you ran it previously] and PR). Make sure to set your website type to the appropriate field as this will be another way for you to quickly sort through your link database:
- Social media
- Personal blog
- Corporate blog
- News/Media
- Community
- Directory
- Other
If you already have a contact for the website you are creating a link record for, it will automatically populate the contact information. If it’s a bigger site and you’ll need to contact a different person in order to obtain that link, you can add a new contact or choose “None” if you don’t know the contact information.
Finally, you can add a “comment” about the link with any special details you want to remember.
Now let’s say you were able to get a link from one of the websites you were targeting. You will want to update that link record to show that the link is active. To do that, all you need to do is go up to your Raven Toolbar and click the Add Link button again. When you do that, a different type of popup will show up on your screen:
In the popup window you can either create a new link record or update a current link record. Because we had already queued it before, we want to update an existing link record. Click the “Select” button and you’ll be taken to the link record where you can now change the status of the link.
You can also add links through the link manager dashboard. When you access the link manager on your dashboard you are presented with a number of options:
Through the dashboard you are able to change the following components in bulk or individually:
- Change the status of a link
- Delete a link
- Move a link to another website project you are working on in Raven (in case you forget to switch projects when adding)
If you’ve added a link for a website before and attempt to add it again, Raven will give you the option of updating the existing link record or creating a new link. This will save you from attempting to obtain the same link more than once.
Finally, you are even able to export links into a CSV or create a PDF report (more on reporting later). You can set the date range of when the links were added, or even export the details you filled in with the associated costs for your paid links. If you’ve previously created an Excel document with your link data in it, you can easily import it to the link manager so you don’t have to spend time going through and adding them all over again.
Contacts / Leads
When you add a link to the link manager, in the “Website Details” section of the form you fill out contact information for the website you are adding. This information is populated into a contact database which you can reference at any time.
The contact database is a compilation of the contact information you’ve filled out when adding a link to any profile. So if you are working on multiple websites that have some crossover you could search this contact database and quickly setup a link with the person you know there.
If you’re interested in investigating further into a contact you can click on their name and it will pull up their contact details:
From the contact details you can look at the number of links that are associated with the account, when the links were created and any tasks that you’ve setup that are associated with the contact.
Website Directory
The Website Directory is a directory of all of the links you’ve added to the Link Manager across all projects and profiles. By default the directory will rank websites by PageRank, but you can sort them by name, profile, number of active links, number of paid links or their quality score.
If you click on the name of one of the directory listings, you’ll be taken to a profile for that individual listing:
Here you will find a bunch of great information about that particular listing. You can see the quality score, information that was collected in the quality analyzer (e.g. domain info), contacts association with that listing, and also link records that are associated with it.
The Content Manager gives you the ability to write an article, press release, blog post, etc. that you’ll be using for your SEO campaign and optimize it using Raven’s tools. You have two options within the Content Manager, you can either import content that you’ve written in a Word document, or you can create HTML content within Raven:
Under the “Keywords” field you can add keywords that you are targeting within the article. When you click the “Add Content” button (once you’ve finished writing), Raven will analyze the content like this:
The analyzer has built in screen readers to determine what audience the content is geared to (it takes the average of six scores). You can view your readability metrics by clicking on the “Scores/Indices” link. So now you can determine if the content you created is appropriate for your target audience.
The other component of the analyzer will measure the frequency, density and relevance of the keywords you are targeting. If the relevance was too high or too low, you can go back down into the content (which is listed right below the rating) and make adjustments to it. When you are finished making updates you can reanalyze it until the keyword statistics are at the level you were targeting.
You can also then view how the content would be displayed on a blog post and even update the content to your blog.
Blog Manager
Raven gives you the ability to compose and publish posts right to your blog. Looking back at the content we created previously, when you look at the content overview you’ll see a button that says “Send to Blog Manager.”
Once you’ve sent it to the blog manager you can assign the blog post to a category that you’ve already setup in your blogging platform (e.g. WordPress), setup a posting date and make any final changes to the content.
When you click “Save Entry” it will publish the content on your blog. The blog manager allows you to edit past blog posts, as well. Simply go back to the main Blog Manager page and click the name of the blog you wish to edit posts for.
The Social dashboard provides you with a lot of great tools for social media management and monitoring. Within the Social Dashboard you can setup a list of social media profiles you want to be able to quickly login and logout of. As mentioned earlier, this is a quick way to switch between multiple personas that you have for a single social website.
Adding a Social Persona
Raven has over 70 social profiles you can setup to login and out of. Typically personas you setup on social media websites will have a majority of the fields filled out the same way. Raven makes it easy to create a persona account that you will use on all of these websites. When you click the “Add Persona” link in the Social Dashboard you’ll be brought to the following form:
Fill out the form as much as possible. This will save you a lot of time in the next step where you will setup which social websites you’ll be using the persona on. Back on your Social Dashboard you’ll see a dropdown box with the name of the persona you created active. Underneath that persona name is a link titled “Add Website.” Click this link to add a social media website this persona will be setup on.
If you select “Default Login” the credentials you filled out in the persona you just setup will be used to login to the account. If for some reason the social media website has different login credentials, you can select “Custom” and enter them. Once you’ve setup the personas on the social websites you’ll be using, you can login to them from either the Social Dashboard or using the “Personas” button on your toolbar (as discussed earlier).
The Social Dashboard also gives you the opportunity to monitor your Twitter persona activity levels. This is great for Twitter accounts you setup for clients and if you are looking for ways to both measure success and visual representations on how the account is performing. All you have to do is click “Enable Monitoring” in the options field next to your Twitter account. Once you do that, you’ll start to see data similar to this:
You can also export the data to a CSV file or setup a PDF report that you’ll be able to customize and send to a client (more on white labeling later).
Social Monitor
The Social Monitor is a great way to track mentions of your brand or any other topics that you are interested in monitoring. It is a reputation management tool that creates great visual reports for clients and it has great tie-in features with other Raven tools.
You can setup a new social monitoring keyword by clicking on the “New Search” link. From here you input a keyword phrase (use quotes for exact phrases), can choose what type of source you want to monitor (blogs, forums, all sources, etc.) and you can include an option to send you update alerts as well.
Once you’ve setup the keyword(s) you want to track, you’ll be taken to the social monitor interface where it will display the following:
- A daily mentions trending graph
- A sentiment rating scale
- Social monitoring results
The Sentiment feature allows you to set the type of tone the mention has about whatever topic you are monitoring. By default the sentiment scale will be set at 50, and as you rate the mentions that Raven finds, the sentiment scale will adjust accordingly. You can click through to each mention and Raven will open up a new window where you can view the full article, tweet, etc. and determine what type of sentiment rating you should give it.
If a mention happens to not be related to you (or to your client), or if it was something you had created, you can hide the mention so it doesn’t affect the trending graph or sentiment.
For mentions that link back to the website you are tracking, or even a mention where you want to contact the content owner to try and get a link, you can easily add it to your link manager by clicking on the “Add Link” option.
The Social Monitoring tool can also be used for advertising and link building research. Instead of monitoring brand mentions, you can setup the tool to monitor a keyword you are targeting and you can setup what platforms you want it to monitor. This is a great way to be alerted for new advertising and link building opportunities that might arise from a blog post someone wrote, a forum posting, etc.
I’d also recommend monitoring your competitors’ mentions so you can find opportunities to recommend your own product and services over theirs. If there is a post bashing your competitor’s service, this is a great opportunity for you to jump in there and make them aware of your service.
You can also create reports based on the social media monitoring tool (covered later).
KnowEm
Raven has also integrated the fantastic username registrar, KnowEm , into their toolset. KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, username or vanity URL on over 100 popular social media websites. You can use their premium service to have them register their usernames for you.
Again, this is Raven coming through with efficiency by having all of your critical tools in one place.
Forum Search
Raven also integrates one of my favorite forum research tools, Omgili. Omgili scans its large database of blogs, forums and other social sites to help you find opportunities to engage your target audience.
As I mentioned in the Research section, Raven has a SERP (keyword ranking) tracker that you can use to monitor the rankings of your own sites, and even your competitors’ ranking positions. Any keywords that you added under the Research section will automatically be added to the SERP tracker.
You can also upload any keywords you currently have setup in an Excel/CSV file. You can select from dozens of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines and Raven will scan the top 50 ranking positions once a week. You can then create a customized PDF report of the results (more on this here).
Raven also offers its own analytics platform as well as integration with Google Analytics.
Raven’s analytics record the basic analytics features (referral data, keyword data, etc.), but with the new integration of Google Analytics, Raven can now:
- Separate organic and paid keywords
- Run analytics and site engagement reports using GA data
It’s simple to setup, too. Just head over to the Settings section and Raven will provide JavaScript for you to add to each page (there is a great WordPress plugin, too!) You can also setup conversion tracking, setup filters, and my favorite feature: automatically import organic links to your link manager.
Before Raven can be integrated with Google Analytics, you need to first make sure you setup authorization for it to do so. To do this go to the Google Analytics section of the Analytics dashboard and follow the onscreen instructions. There’s also a settings menu where you can setup goals for your account.
I know I sound like a broken record, but this is another time saving feature of Raven by integrating your analytics data into their toolset and allowing you to add any organic links to your website to the link manager. You can also create beautiful reports on the data, saving you a ton of time.
Raven recently gave its reporting tool a major facelift and it is one of its best features (in my opinion). You can now create customized reports for each of Raven’s tools that I’ve covered in this guide. That includes the Google Analytics features, the Twitter monitoring feature, SERP tracker and Social Media monitoring tool.
Before you run your first report I recommend that you setup your customized template to run the report on. You can do this under the “Templates” link on the Reports dashboard.
Here you can add your company logo, header and footer information, and how you want the rankings to be displayed in the report. Once you’ve completed the template, decide if you want the template to be used for that website only, for your entire profile or for your entire account.
Now head back to the Report Wizard and setup your report. Under the report details you can setup the report to be generated automatically. You can set the frequency, day of the month and for what date range. You can have the report automatically emailed to you, as well.
The Report Wizard has a similar interface to Google’s Custom Reports, so if you’ve ever used that, you’ll be used to its dynamic report generator.
Every aspect of your report is customizable. Under the Report Options you can add the following pages:
- Cover page
- Summary page
- Quality analyzer
- Design analyzer
- Keyword analyzer
- Wordtracker keyword report
- AdWords keyword report
- SEMRush keyword report
- Link report of the links you’ve added to the link manager
- Twitter activity summary (if you have enabled monitoring)
- Social monitor (if you have any keywords being monitored)
- Ranking report with ranking detail and/or a trending graph
- Raven analytics detail:
- Summary (that you write)
- Top keywords
- Top referrers
- Google Analytics detail:
- Summary (that you write)
- Engagement
- Top Keywords
- Top referrers
The best way to explain how fantastic the reporting feature is to take a look at the sample report that I generated. I’ve left comments explaining what the features are. You can view the PDF report here.
What I intend to summarize in this section is that with all of the fantastic tools Raven has integrated within it, you can report on all of the work you are doing to your boss, clients, etc. Because it allows you to brand it with your own company logo, it will look like a traditional report that you would prepare.
Raven offers much more than your traditional admin features. In the admin dashboard you can edit and add users to your Raven account, setup profiles and roles for those accounts, and use their new white labeling feature. I’ll also cover their messaging and task features in this section.
User Manager
The user manager allows you to add and manage the number of people who can use your Raven account. You are given two user accounts (your primary account and one additional user) in the SEO Pro subscription of Raven. Each additional user can be added for $19 a month. You can also manage the Read-Only user accounts (more on this in the White Labeling section) in this section.
When you setup a user account you fill in the basic information (name, username, password and email) and decide if you want to give them admin access. You also then setup their user roles and profile roles.
User Roles
User roles are the ideal way to manage your team’s access to Raven to prevent human error. Let’s say you have three people in your team. One of them will be handling all aspects of SEO (from keyword research to link building), another will only be responsible for link building and the third person is solely responsible for keyword research.
You’ll want to setup each role separately. When setting up the role you can restrict access to different features of Raven. Your keyword research team member won’t need to worry about social media monitoring, so you can turn that section of Raven off to them. Another example would be if you are outsourcing your link building efforts and you don’t want the outside vendor to have access to your analytics data. You can setup the roles to be anything you want. Here’s an example of the roles I’ve created:
Messaging & Tasks
Raven also gives you the ability to assign tasks and send/receive messages to and from other Raven users. You’ll have an inbox where you’ll receive messages from other users and any alerts that you have setup. The inbox can be found in the top left corner of the Raven interface (next to the task manager.)
The Task Manager will display all outstanding and completed tasks for all users (if you are the admin). You can assign tasks to multiple users, set due dates, assign a priority and even what website the task is for.
Profile Management
This is the section where you can setup various profiles to add websites to. More than likely you’ll want to setup at least two profiles: a personal account (which you can restrict access to) and a work account.
White Label
Now this feature of Raven really sets it apart from its competitors. I’m not aware of any tool that allows you to do this. White labeling allows you to create view-only accounts that strip out the Raven branding and replace it with your own logo and colors. You can even setup a sub-domain for each of your clients to view their dashboard and setup a secure login from anywhere on your company’s website for them to login.
So let’s say you have five clients who don’t fully understand what link building is. They know they are investing a ton of money in it and their traffic is going up as a result, but their bosses want to see the work behind it. Now you can setup a sub-domain for them (client.raventools.com) and style it to look like it came from your company.
Let’s take a look into the white labeling setup:
As you can see above, it’s much more than just slapping your logo on there. I’m sure you have a custom color set to go along with your company’s website. Now you can integrate that within the toolset.
When setting up the Read-Only user account for your clients, you can give them access to as many of Raven’s features as you want (just like with the other user roles). These accounts are all free and you can create as many as you want.
The secure login form can be branded onto your company website so it is integrated with the rest of your services. Raven will give you a custom script to add wherever you want on your site and style it using CSS to fit your website layout.
In the near future Raven will be able to support use of your own domain (instead of a sub-domain), but this feature will require an additional monthly fee and will include your own domain, SSL certificate and your own server that is managed by Raven.
I was able to get the inside scoop from Jon Henshaw of Raven on some of the upcoming features coming to a Raven toolset near you:
- New and updated Analytics views and reports, including date comparison
- Event management that will be integrated into tools and reporting
- Integration with more 3rd party services
- A new secret tool that will be released on or before PubCon Vegas!
With all of the features Raven offers the $79/month price tag is easy to justify. You can easily roll the cost into the price of your services if you need to. At the very least sign up for the free 30 day trial and actively use the tool. I guarantee you’ll quickly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your services.
As you can guess, all links to Raven include an affiliate link. I greatly appreciate anyone who signs up for their free trial and eventually a full account using the link. I hope you find the guide helpful and I’ll continue to update it as Raven’s toolset expands.
I’d like to give a special thanks to Britta Fuller for creating all of the awesome graphics you’ve seen in this guide.
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