Article Submission Review

Traffic Travis Review

• Overall Rating
• Ease Of Use
• Price

4.3333333333333

Overview

Mark Ling’s Traffic Travis has been generating a lot of attention lately as it has been promoted pretty heavily and so we felt it would be a good product to check out and give you our take on it. Trying to categorize Traffic Travis is a bit of a challenge because it does quite a bit of stuff – from rank tracking, to baseline reports to keyword research (as well as some other stuff). So in our assessment we feel it is best categorized as a SEO tool.

This product is most appropriately categorized as a research tool because while it does a lot to help you find things to correct or improve on your site, it doesn’t directly do anything other than generate reports. Ultimately, you have to act on the information it provides if you intend to see any real results from using it. That’s fine, but we just want to be clear about what it is you are buying here – this is a research and discovery tool. Its intention is to identify errors and areas of improvement so that you can improve your site and get naturally better rankings. It also has some tools which are geared towards helping you discover new advertising locations and methods that are appropriate to your site.

Traffic Travis Features

Traffic Travis is broken up into several different modules in a tabbed interface. As you click on the tabs to switch between these modules you will get a popup message that displays a training video you can watch about that module. The videos are well done and informative without “dragging on” as many of these video training programs do. These are just short and sweet videos giving you a quick demo of how to use the specific module.

Traffic Travis also has a concept of a project so that you can work with many different websites and track all of their data independently. When setting up a project you’ll get an input screen like the one below that allows you to specify a project name, the site URL, the sitemap URL, keywords for the project and select the search engines to monitor as well as a couple of other options for the number of results to check and the search rankings update frequency.

 

This is a quick overview of each of the modules.

• Dashboard – The Dashboard area is the main tab or homepage to the application and it is what I would call a baseline metrics page. It has various information about your site that is summary in nature and allows you to monitor the high level progress of your marketing. For example it tracks PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Pages Indexed, # of Page Warnings, Backlinks, Unique IPs, Unique Domains and other information. This is all good baseline information to track and monitor on a regular basis (like every 30 days or so). Only thing we didn’t like here was that some of the data was not accurate. For example our site PR is PR4 yet it was shown as PR0. FYI, we’ve got a good blog post on baselines here – SEO Baselines & Rank Tracking – All The Boring Stuff You Gotta Do


 

• My Site – The My Site area gives you detailed information on each of the pages on your site. It shows you the PageRank, the Backlinks, and the warnings it finds. Most of these items can be double clicked on to drill down further and get detailed info. For example, on the Page Warnings you can double click and get a popup page showing you it’s findings and recommendations.


 

• Research – The research view gives you a fairly simple keyword research tool very similar to Google’s own adwords external keyword tool. It does pull back some additional information such as Avg. PPC, InTitle and InAnchor numbers and an overall SEO Difficulty rating for the given keyword. It will also bring back a lot of variations for the keyword that you input – you can select 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 or even 2000 options to get a lot of keywords to choose from. After you retrieve the data, you can also set a filter to only show the relevant keywords per your criteria.


 

• SEO – The SEO tab is really four tools in one. It has four sub-tabs that you can select from for Rankings, Competition, Backlinks and Link Finder. The rankings tab will show you your current rankings for the keywords that you have added to the project as well as whether they have improved or regressed since the last check. The competition tab has lots of interesting link data about your competing URLS showing their backlink counts, page rank, domain and IP counts, etc… The Backlinks tab will show you information about your backlinks to your site such as their page rank, alexa rank, anchor text and a speculative indication of authority. Lastly the Link Finder is a tool that helps you find other sites for your keywords where you could potentially get a backlink.


 

• PPC – The PPC tab is really two tabs in one – one dedicated to Adsense and the other to Adwords. The Adsense Finder sub-tab for example will give you information about your competitors that are ranking for your keywords and are using Adsense so that you can target them with advertising if you want. The Adwords Competition tool does a similar thing for Adwords and gives you quite a bit of information including allowing you to preview your competitors ads.


 

How It Works

The program runs on your local computer and is not a web hosted application, though it does depend on and require a live Internet connection. When you set it up there is the option to use a software proxy if you want and also options for you to input a Google Adwords account login to assist in retrieving the search data. Unfortunately Traffic Travis does not work on a Mac. Honestly I don’t understand why today’s vendors don’t all use something like Adobe Air and release cross platform applications, but sorry mac users, you’ll have to resort to Windows emulation.

What We Like About Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis provides a good mix of several tools that most any Internet Marketer will need – rank tracking, baseline tools, etc… and all at a very affordable one-time purchase price. We especially like the Dashboard and its baseline information as we feel this is good information to be tracking on a monthly basis.

The My Site information provides a nice page by page summary for your site – something that is not only useful but convenient to view all in one spot. The same can be said for the competition view. The page by page view, however, is our favorite feature of this tool for several reasons. First of all you can quickly and easily see all of your site pages in a single list and a lot of very helpful data is at your fingertips.

For example, you can quickly spot those pages that don’t have many backlinks and set them up to be targeted in future SEO campaigns. You can also quickly and easily filter your list of pages by PageRank and identify high PR inner pages. Another great little feature is the fact that it shows you on-page SEO warnings for each page – little stuff like missing H1 tags or missing meta descriptions. These little onsite tweaks have become more and more important and when you have a large site it is easy to miss them.

We are also very pleased with the amount of value this little gem delivers for such a basic one-time price point. Now, it’s not the best at any one thing that it does – any dedicated tool will beat it in any of its modules – but the fact is that it does a lot for the price and will make a lot of people very happy with the information that they can get out of it.

Lastly, we do like the PPC tab and its Adsense and Adwords data. There are lots of other tools that do a much better job with this, but it’s a good subset of information and can be very helpful.

What We Don’t Like About Traffic Travis

While we like Traffic Travis, the tool is a bit limiting because of its strongest asset – its low price. This in some ways hurts it because while it covers a broad set of topics and features, it really doesn’t go in-depth into any of them. In other words, the goal of trying to do everything at a very affordable one-time purchase price just limits the tool. In general the tool does a lot and is a good value, but when you look at any of modules individually they just can’t compare to the alternatives in the marketplace.

The Dashboard is helpful and useful, but the fact is you can easily pull all of the data it provides from several free sources. The nice part is it is a time saver and we do appreciate that, but there is no apparent way to save the Dashboard baseline data and we firmly believe that baselines are worthless unless you save a copy of them every month so that you have a month to month comparison for trend analysis.

For the other modules each is okay as a general tool, but disappointing when you compare it to a dedicated tool. For example, the keyword research module is adequate for a beginner, but it is very limited when compared to Micro Niche Finder or Keywords Magnet. The Competition module is also very limited in comparison to an awesome tool like Market Samurai. For link analysis or recommendations tools like SEO Powersuite’s SpyGlass and LinkAsssit are far better tools. In general, the entire SEO Powersuite replaces this tool. Likewise, it’s rank tracking while okay for a beginner is really weak compared to a full quality product like Rank Tracker.

This, however, is being a bit unfair to the tool, because at the $77 price point, Traffic Travis clearly cannot compete with expensive suites such as SEO Powersuite. That is really the sweet spot of this tool – its affordability. While it lacks lots of the pro level depth that we require, for most people out there this tool can be a great little asset.

Our Summary

Traffic Travis does some things that we like and overall we like the concept. The thing is, we’re pretty picky and we have a collection of the best tools out there, so it just doesn’t live up to our expectations but keep in mind our expectations are of a higher end product. For the price point that Traffic Travis sells at, I don’t think you can find a better tool out there.

The reality is that this tool is a good deal for someone that is just getting started or has a very tight budget. You will get a bunch of useful, if limited, tools and all for a single price that is a one-time payment with no monthly subscription fees. So if that is your situation, then this may be the tool for you. But if you’re a power user or have any of these other recommended tools mentioned above, you will likely be disappointed with Traffic Travis.

Traffic Travis Pricing

The pricing is one of the biggest advantages that this tool offers. It is a single payment of $77 to purchase Traffic Travis with no monthly recurring charges or annual maintenance charges. So, like we said above, if you’re on a very tight budget and have no tools and just getting started, this may make sense for you.

Traffic Travis Bonus Offer
While Traffic Travis does not really meet our criteria, we recognize that if you’re just getting started it may make sense for you so we still wanted to offer a bonus for you if you decide to purchase Traffic Travis via our link. So what we will give you as a bonus is something you are obviously seeking if you are buying Traffic Travis – backlinks. If you purchase Traffic Travis through our link we will provide you with 10 of our High Powered Backlinks from a private network. We will create 5 blog posts and post them to our private PR3 or higher blogs, and each post will have 2 backlinks to your site of choice. You will also receive a 10% off coupon code for any future orders of articles from ArticlesOnTap.com in case you have a need for any further content or SEO. To redeem your bonus simply follow these Traffic Travis Bonus instructions. Once we confirm your purchase was made through our link, you will receive your bonuses.

 

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Tags: affordable seo software, beginner seo tool, mark ling's traffic travis, traffic travis review, traffic travis seo tool