You can be a blogger producing the best content in the world and never be found online.
Or you might have a quality product, ethically sourced at the most affordable prices. But if no one knows about you, no one is going to buy from you.
Everyone who wants to be found online has three primary concerns. They want to discover where their traffic is coming from, who is linking to them, and which of their content is the most popular.
While there are many SEO services to which you can turn, Mondovo is an excellent resource for evaluating your online performance. Mondovo gathers in-depth data on your keyword ranking and competition, your site and page optimization, and your social media presence.
In addition to being compatible with Google Analytics, Mondovo comes with its own analytics, giving you valuable information and making it easier to find that info than Google does. The platform enables you to export any information you choose, as well as white label your reports. And Mondovo’s pay-as-you-go pricing model allows you only to purchase what you need at an affordable rate, with no contracts or upgrades needed.
Dashboard
When you first sign up for Mondovo, you automatically get $3 of credit and a 7-day free trial of the solution.
Once you create your account, you’ll see that in the middle of your dashboard are two boxes, one with quick links to help you get started and another for the reports you’ll generate.
You can either go to each section and subsection on the left to find what you want, or you can click on the quick links to go directly to the information you want to see. The latter option is one you’ll likely choose as you become more familiar with the platform. Here’s what your dash will look like after you’ve been using Mondovo for a while.
The menu on the left-hand side of the dash lists your main areas of focus: SEO, Social, and Web Analytics, as well as the Website Emulator, which displays how your website will look on different devices. As you begin collecting data in each of these areas, you will pay for and generate reports that you have the option of exporting and downloading.
While any reports you create will of course be in their respective sections (SEO, Social, etc.), each one will also be stored for easy access under Reports. You can also see which reports you have downloaded, as well as your payment totals, in Downloads and Payments.
As you begin using Mondovo, you’ll be able to see your total credit remaining at the bottom left under Account Balance.
Help as You Go
Mondovo gives you a live chat box in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. This is beneficial because the data that Mondovo provides for you is quite detailed. It’s good to know you can always ask any questions you might have.
In different sections of Mondovo, there are demo videos and sample reports to give you an idea of what each feature does. I found these to be invaluable since sometimes I had no idea what a feature did till I watched the videos.
SEO
Rank Tracker
At the top left of the screen, there is the option to add your first campaign. These campaigns will track which keywords you rank for and how you’re doing compared to your competitors. I created two campaigns for growmap.com, the primary one comparing GrowMap to its two closest competitors.
Note that in the top right corner of the screen, there is a Help button. If you click on it, you can take a tour of the Rank Tracker.
When you configure your Rank Tracker report, you can determine how often you want to view your keyword data. I chose daily, so each day that I logged back in to Mondovo, I had notifications waiting for me with keyword ranking updates. You get a report summary at the top of the report, as well as detailed info on your keyword ranking throughout the report.
You likely are already aware of your major competitors, but Mondovo can also suggest them based on your URL or keywords. I didn’t find the former method helpful, and the latter brought up sites that didn’t have a relevant domain authority. So I simply entered the URLs of two known GrowMap competitors. Using information from Google Analytics, I entered 15 main keywords for which GrowMap is ranking.
It’s noteworthy that rather charging you for a set of 10-20 keywords, Mondovo charges per keyword you want to add. The solution bases the price on whether your want the keyword tracked daily, weekly, or monthly. For Mondovo to track my keywords daily, it cost $0.09 per keyword per month.
It usually doesn’t take long for Mondovo to generate the reports you require. Some take a few seconds, while others take 10-15 minutes. And whenever each one is ready, you will get a notification at the top right corner of the screen.
Then when your next report is ready, you will see the summary with the updated information.
On-Demand Rank Checker
While the Rank Tracker updates your ranking at whichever time period you choose (daily, weekly, monthly), the On-Demand Rank Checker is just what it sounds like. At any time you want, you can generate a report to check your keyword ranking.
Bulk Metrics
Through Bulk Metrics, you can enter a series of domains and gather important data on them, which you can view either as a table or in a side-by-side comparison. The metrics provided cover social, domains and pages, and linking.
The metrics were detailed and helpful. However, I did think it would be useful to have a little more information on what each one meant. For example, GrowMap’s Moz score was 5. People familiar with SEO are no doubt more familiar with Moz than I am, but I had to look it up.
Link Research
Mondovo’s Link Research allows you to create a report providing information on your backlinks. You can create one for an entire website or for particular web pages. The backlinks report tells you the top five anchors on your site.
It also gives you the number of your site’s referring domains, IPs, and backlinks, as well as your overall link strength score on a scale of 1-100.
Before you generate your report, you can select how many backlinks you want to see (such as 1000). Along with those links, the report will tell you their destination pages, the anchor text for each one, and the date when each was first seen. You can also check the link status (i.e., whether or not it still exists) for an extra charge ($0.002/URL).
Website Audit
In addition to providing information on your ranking and links, Mondovo helps you figure out if your website has any issues, such as broken links, missing meta tags, and slow-loading pages. The audit helps you to optimize the linking on your site by evaluating the site’s linking structure.
I found the website audit to be extremely detailed and well worth it. It found quite a few missing meta descriptions, in addition to duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate titles. It identified long titles, long meta descriptions, and missing meta titles. And the report gave me a breakdown of external and internal links per page, as well as if any of them were broken.
The audit also analyzed the content’s link to text ratio and whether the site’s content was optimized. It determined whether there was duplicate content (there wasn’t) and if there was content below 250 words (again, there wasn’t). It also identified any pages with no clear target keyword.
Another aspect of the website the audit evaluated was HTML & File Optimization. It identified 95 missing alt tags, one missing heading tag, 97 slow loading pages, 0 large pages sizes, and 26 low page scores.
Finally, the report also broke down social metrics, but only of the home page. While these metrics did include Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, I was surprised that there were not metrics for Twitter. Overall, though, I thought the website audit was incredibly helpful.
On-Page Analyzer
The On-Page Analyzer is useful if you need detailed metrics on specific pages. Note that this feature is one aspect of the Website Audit, which evaluates an entire domain. I asked this feature to assess the same keywords that I entered in the Rank Tracker.
The report found images missing alt attributes, analyzed the ratio of links to word count, found the page loading speed to be low, and found several internal links that were no-followed.
The Analyzer gave me a breakdown of the internal and external links, including which were being nofollowed, and also evaluated the social metrics (shares, likes, etc.) of that page.
Keyword Tools
Keyword Research
The Keyword Research feature under Keyword Tools is free of charge. But if I wanted to include search volume and cost-per-click (CPC) data, the cost for that was $0.30.
A free search for “small business advice” brought up 275 results not only for that exact keyword but also for variants of it, as well as related terms. Doing a paid search would have resulted in 300-700 more keywords from Google Keyword Planner.
You can see below the results of the paid search on “small business advice.” Globally, the search volume is 1600 and the CPC is $5.19. In the U.S., the search volume is 480 and the CPC is $10.66.
I could also view the results for searching “small business advice” in Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, Quora, and Google Trends. After a few minutes, Mondovo notified me that they had more keywords for me and that I should referesh the page.
Competitors’ Keywords and Bulk Search Volume
With these features, you can see which keywords your competitors are ranking for, as well as how often certain keywords are searched and their respective costs-per-click.
Keyword Generator
This Keyword Generator feature is free. With it, you can enter keywords into two to three boxes to generate a variety of combinations, for example, if you want to run a PPC campaign. I didn’t immediately understand the value of this feature at first, so the demo video was very helpful to me.
One useful aspect of the Keyword Generator is that you can import a large number of preset keywords already in the solution. So if you need to run a campaign in all 50 states in the U.S., you can easily import the state names by clicking on “Import From Source.” That way, you don’t have to type every single state yourself.
I found it’s important to use this tool strategically and with a minimum number of keywords in each box. Otherwise, the results are not that helpful. For example, one category of preset keywords in the Keyword Generator is article ideas, such as “5 amazing [noun] hacks.”
I didn’t find it beneficial to import articles ideas within the Keyword Generator because doing so left the word “noun” in the results. When I put “freelance,” “blogging,” and “blogger” in the first box with “career,” “advice,” and “right tablet” in the second, I got a list of nine combinations that were useful.
Keyword Replacer
The demo was also helpful for understanding the Keyword Replacer.
The Keyword Replacer is beneficial for taking care of the sort of problem I had in the Keyword Generator, although I would have liked to have been able to import the keywords I had created in my Keyword Generator reports.
I was able, however, to select keywords in the category “Article Ideas using Numbers & Nouns.” I selected 50 (out of 96) possible keywords from this category and imported them in the first box. I then said I wanted to replace “[noun]” with the keywords “influencer marketing,” “blogger outreach,” and “freelance career.”
The report generated 197 combinations, including the original article suggestions that still had the word “[noun]” in it. This was listed as the “Seed” and the possible keyword combinations from that seed followed it. So once I figured out how to use these Keyword features, there was a lot I could do with them.
The Keyword Spinner
The Keyword Spinner is for when you need to write multiple meta descriptions or short paragraphs. Mondovo gives you a basic template for your meta descriptions in which you’ll have spots for inserting a variety of keywords.
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console measures your site’s 1) total clicks, 2) total impressions, 3) average click-through, and 4) average position. Mondovo also takes these four areas and gives you stats on your highest scoring pages, as well as which countries visit your site the most. This feature also tells you which devices people use the most to visit your site.
Tag Manager
As you generate reports, Mondovo automatically creates tags for your personal organization. You also have the option of creating your own.
Social Analytics
Facebook Analytics
As you might expect, Facebook and Twitter Analytics provide information on your engagement and your reach.
In Mondovo, you can view, as well as like and comment on, your own Facebook wall. You’re supposed to be able to see others’ posts as well, but for some reason there weren’t any displaying.
Under page statistics, you can view graphs of data on your likes and unlikes and page views. The graph also includes who has interacted with or mentioned your page and the demographics of your users.
Facebook Analytics gives you a breakdown of your reach by region of the world and day of the week. And you can see the URLs by which people most often arrive at your Facebook page.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics tells you stats on user engagement, your total number of tweets, and how many tweets you have favorited.
The data includes how many followers you have and how many people you are following. It also tells you your average number of tweets per day and how many curated lists of which you are a part. Twitter Analytics also comes with the ability to track who follows and unfollows your account both daily and long term.
Mondovo gives you get a useful chart of what kinds of tweets you typically post. You can view an hourly, weekly, and monthly breakdown of your tweets. You can also see a list of mentions (including your own).
Mondovo even provides detailed analytics on your followers. You can discover how many followers they have, how many accounts they follow, how many tweets they have, and what languages they speak. You can also see how recently they’ve tweeted and their ages.
Something worth noting is that in the Twitter Analytics section, the dropdown shows name instead of Twitter username. This is beneficial if someone has clients. But it would be bad if someone has multiple accounts that all have their name on them.
Another feature that would be valuable is being able to compare these stats with those of Google Analytics in order to get a clearer understanding of the traffic flow from Google and Twitter.
Social Competition
Conveniently, you can compare your Facebook and Twitter profiles to those of your competitors. As with the Rank Tracker, you simply enter the URLs of the profiles you want to check.
While the report compared the two competitors with each other, I wish it had included GrowMap in the comparison. The report’s breakdown of competitors’ tweets was similar to the information Mondovo gave about GrowMap’s tweets (times of the week they were most likely to tweet, their user engagment, follower info, etc.).
I appreciated the competitor insights listed at the very top of the report. There were useful facts, such as how many more followers one account had compared to the other and which account posted the most frequently.
There were several bugs with the social aspect of Mondovo when it came to looking at the Twitter wall and gathering information on GrowMap’s social competitors. However, these are issues Mondovo is the process of resolving.
Web Analytics
Google Analytics
To see Google Analytics data in Mondovo, you’ll have to sign up for the Google Analytics widget in your Mondovo account.
In Google Analytics, you can see your number of users, sessions, page views, and your bounce rate. You can see your top search engine referrals, and your various types of traffic (organic, direct, social, etc.).
You also get detailed info on your top pages, top keywords, top referrers, and top countries.
One feature I thought was pretty cool was that not only can you see by color which countries visit your site the most but you can also hover your cursor over any country. Doing so will show you exactly how many people from that country have visited your site during the time period specified (in this case Feb. 2-March 1).
Mondovolytics
Mondovo comes with its own analytics feature called Mondovolytics. It costs $5/month and requires you to put a tracking code on your site, which is not difficult.
Mondovolytics gives you detailed metrics about your visitors, including whether they are new or returning and the actions they took on your site (page views, downloads). You can see the average time people spend on your site per visit, as well as your bounce rate.
Mondovolytics enables you to compare how many and how often visitors were on your site today versus yesterday or the previous weeks and months, depending on how long you’ve had Mondovolytics set up. You can view detailed info on your links, such as whether they are incoming, outgoing, recent, etc.
Easier Than Google Analytics
“Traffic Sources” tells you how people arrived at your site. For example, did they do a Google search, did they type in your URL directly, or did they arrive via links? Notably, discovering whether they arrived via links is easier to find in Mondovolytics than it is in Google Analytics. Under “Locale,” Mondovolytics tells you which internet provider your audience is using, as well as your users’ hostnames. This information is particularly useful for B2Bs.
One of the most important and helpful aspects of Mondovolytics is the data on content.
Anyone familiar with online marketing knows the important of having content that is strong and valuable to readers. Information on content is also difficult to find in Google Analytics, so it’s valuable that Mondovo makes it easy to discover which of your content is the most popular with your audience.
Goals
If you want to track whether or not your users are completing a specific call to action (CTA) on your site, you can set up one or more goals. For example, one of your objectives could be getting people to sign up to your newsletter. Under “Goals,” you’ll name that goal and enter the URL of the page you want people to end up at (such as your “Thank You” page).
You can then choose to set up an alert if you want to be notified every time someone completes your CTA. With this feature, you can track how effective your site is at achieving your desired actions.
There are a number of other beneficial aspects to Mondovolytics. As with other Mondovo features, you can export the data of your choice, specified by date. I will say that it would have helpful if Mondovolytics had the information icon to explain what any confusing metrics meant. Other sections of Mondovo have this element, and I would’ve found it extremely helpful in this situation.
Support
At any point while using Mondovo, you can view demos or sample reports, ask a question in the chat box, or send an email to contact@mondovo.com. Something that was different from other solutions is that when you log out, you’re taken to Mondovo’s blog. This is a “minor” characteristic of the platform that I thought showed a focus on benefiting and educating the customer.
Payments
Mondovo’s pricing model means that you only spend money on what you actually need. There is no set monthly or annual fee. However, when you do choose to generate reports or purchase Mondovolytics, you are committing to pay for some of those benefits monthly. The majority of the charges in Mondovo are cents or fractions of a cent.
So it is convenient that in Payments > Credit Usage, you can see exactly what money you’ve spent on which actions. In Payments, you can also view your recurring monthly costs, as well as the next payment you’ll owe on your monthly billing cycle.
Conclusion
If you want people to find you online, you need data on who your audience is. You need to know where they are coming from and why they want to come to your site. Mondovo is an affordable solution that can provide you with detailed information on exactly those questions. And the week-long trial with $3 of credit makes it easy for you to get a feel for whether or not it is the right platform for you.
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