I have been using Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) within an agency environment for more than four years now. It has always worked very well to generate data for monthly reports and to perform keyword research and in-depth competitor analysis.

With the recent release of version 9.0, many new features have been added, including the benefit of link building aids that have never before been seen in the suite. It is now known as acomplete SEO software solution because it contains elements for link building as well Google Analytics integration, ranking, and social metrics.

If you have not yet acquired the new version, feel free to download the latest software so you can try out some of the features mentioned in this post. If you are new to AWR, you can try it freefor 30 days.

When selecting keywords to target within a campaign or choosing new keywords to include, keyword difficultly is always an important consideration. The more information you can collect from competitors websites, the better you can understand where your own site can go. By discovering new long tail opportunities that are relevant to your niche, you can end up securing a steady flow of targeted traffic to your site from multiple keyword variations, instead of just from one head term that everyone in your niche goes after.

AWR 9.0 features a new keyword difficulty tool that will give you a breakdown per keyword, search engine, and website so you can see where a specific keyword is tracked within the SERPs, and, more importantly, it will give you quality metrics that can indicate why a particular website may be seen as an authority source for that given keyword.

Metrics include: Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Linking Root Domains (LRDs) to Page, and Linking Root Domains to Domain (SEOmoz link quality indicators):

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The main advantage of the above is you can quickly see the top 10 search results for any given keyword within your project. This allows a quick snapshot view of all the metrics in one table, plus you can generate nice looking charts to understand more about why your site (or a competitors site) may be ranking higher or lower than other websites for any given search query. You can also use the keyword discovery tool to research new terms and add them to your existing project.

Its often handy to see how a link profile looks visually. This can help you answer questions such as:

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Getting More Out of AWR (Advanced Web Rankings) in v9.0