What do you like best about RankActive?
Rank Tracking:
Rankactive is generally attractive software - but what makes it a particularly sensible choice is the very low cost for Ranktracking. Many vendors provide daily queries for a variety of popular search engines and do simulate search from most countries / cities in the world. The number of included keywords often at first glance doesn't look bad either - but it's worth checking the details:
The standard billing model in the SEO-software industry does not look at the count of individual keyword but rather counts the number of search queries performed per keyword. If you track the performance of a particular search-term in 5 countries or in 5 different search engines, 5 credits will be required for this one search term alone. The comfortable looking quota of 1000 keywords may in reality shrink down to meager 200 search terms quickly.
RankActive works differently: There is no credit system - for $ 69.95 (on monthly billing) you can really check 2500 keywords daily, with five different search engine configurations. Hence one gets hugely more data for the money, than with all comparable products we have tried.
Cheaper one can only check large amounts of keywords with custom tools and a lot of proxies - not counting the setup effort. Checking daily rankings with local machines also came at the expense that computers / Internet bandwidth are occupied for likely hours. RankActive goes through search queries in six-digits order within minutes and makes the result conveniently available inside the browser – local hardware remains perfectly idle.
Interface + usability
A big plus point of RankActive is the tidy interface with great-looking graphs and table functionalities, unique in the industry. Some good SEO tools allow users to show and hide and table columns. RankActive goes even one step further by letting users re-order tables with drag and drop. It would be nice if typical spreadsheet programs such as Excel or Google Sheets made this so easy. Likewise unique is the facility to display tables tidily grouped by the values in an individual column. Also the interface for data filtering has been solved very well - constantly needed filter functions are reached right from the table header and without modal dialog boxes.
The user interface, programmed in Google's Angular is fully responsive and makes it possible to use all program functions on Desktop machines and Smartphose alike – that still is far from being ubiquitous in 2019.
Onpage analysis:
RankActive comes with a tidy on-page workspace and and already with its "Optimal" tarif offers 15,000 crawling depth - per project. If you use the contract to the fullest you may crawl up to 375,000 pages for as often as you like. Onepage tools provided are perfectly adequate for all common analyzes.
Keyword Research:
RankActive has a high performance keyword research workspace and apparently runs a large own index. Within seconds you can read out the complete ranking of competitors and either save as tables or add to the ranking. Also interesting is a sandbox feature that allows you to store keyword candidates within the program without continuously tracking them. It would make sense however, to save these keywords with all relevant KPIs in that sandbox.
Reporting / Teamwork
We do in-house SEO and therefore have no need for customer-reports. However, this workspace is remarkably complete and versatile and certainly worth a mention. At an extremely low price point SEO agencies may generate reports with their own branding. For daily work with collected data, all tables may get quickly exported standard spreadsheet formats. Also unique in this price range is the generous team-support - already the package for $ 69.95/month lets you add 25 team members and offers a rich set of tools to manage user rights. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about RankActive?
RankActive runs as a Web-Service and not as a Desktop software. While this has the advantage that all the heavy lifting doesn't take place on local machines and that data is available on all operating systems and device types it also suffers from typical disadvantages of services which supply a lot of data via the web: RankActive may be slow at times – and while there's Loader gifs to indicate that the program is still fetching data is not always evident when data delivery has completed. Those who are familiar with their projects can figure out quickly that a certain number is out of expected range and needs updating, but for new or occasional users such may cause a problem. A more rigid system to distinguish old data from data newly served due to custom filtering surely made sense.
Also there's occasional and pretty obscure bugs with data filtering – but I've seen such happening in any comparable tool we used before. Support is very responsive and tries to sort things out, program updates do appear frequently.
While RankActive offers a wide array of valuable tools, one will need other tools, such as Google's Search Console or the free Console Rocket by Linkdex to check Click Impressions, CTR and Clicks. Also there's no more a built in backlink-workspace– RankActive actually had a very nice implementation, which was able to store many backlink-candidates along with quality indicators and contact data. That workspace however worked with third party data and unfortunately got removed, quite recently. There were rumors that the RankActive guys build their own index – so there's room for hope that they'll re-introduce it one day. For the time being one will have to use alternative products for Link-Tracking / building. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
