Nowadays, everybody is vying for online presence. As the internet market grows, so does the number of blogs, online stores, and websites. You can see it for yourself; the sheer volume of online stores and markets is ever-increasing. Because the Internet is ruling everything, you want to make sure you stand out of the crowd. Of course, there are a dozen other people doing exactly what you do and hoping to leave you behind. To be able to beat them and do better, you need to monitor them and know how they do what they do. Well, there’s a way to know that too.

These days, a number of comparative tools are available online; tools that will tell you how you are faring on the Internet as well as how your competitors are faring. With the help of these applications, you can know how to grow on the Internet.

One such application is SimilarWeb. When we used it, we loved it! Read on to find out why.

SimilarWeb – Find out which way you’re sliding over the Internet!

Started by an Israeli company that goes by the name of SimilarGroup, the SimilarWeb online competition intelligence tool gives you the insights and traffic on your website. All you have to do is provide the URL of your live website and see where you rank, how far you have managed to reach your audience, and how you do in user engagement. With these and more powerful insights, it is easy to know where you are going wrong and what you can do to make your website rule the marketplace.

Some of the important features of the SimilarWeb application are:

• The tool lets you know where you rank as compared the top 50 websites in the selected industry or country.
• It gives traffic estimates on a monthly basis. You can look up your website’s traffic estimates for up to the last six months.
• It enables you to see the number of times your page has been visited and the number of page views for up to the last six months.
• The tool shows you where in the world your users are streaming in from. The percentage of user traffic from five leading countries can be viewed.
• SimilarWeb provides a list of referring sites that your traffic is pouring in from. The list includes both, inbound and outbound referrals.
• It lets you search traffic based on organic keywords and paid keywords.
• You can use the tool to rank the top 5 social websites, such as Facebook, twitter, and Instagram, that send in traffic to your website.
• It also provides you with the ability to view sites that have similar content like your site.

With a strong team and data-driven marketing strategies firmly backing it, SimilarWeb is ideal for agencies, marketers, analysts, and business developers.

How to use the tool

To start playing around with SimilarWeb sign up with Google, LinkedIn, or punch in your corporate email id and a few other details. Thereafter, you’ll be asked to provide a phone number, website URL, and some information about your company to proceed. A slight inconvenience here is that the tool won’t let you proceed with a free sign-up without asking for a valid phone number and other details. While providing a URL and information like team size and industry is ok, some users might not be comfortable in sharing their phone numbers with a tool they’re just trying out. Demo versions should ideally not ask for such personal information.

Once you’re through the sign-up phase, you’ll be asked to key in your website’s URL and the websites you wish to compare it with (your competitors). Thereafter you’ll be redirected to a dashboard with various options like website overview, website audience, traffic sources, traffic destination, website content, competitors, etc. All these options are listed within the dashboard’s left hand panel and can be expanded to reveal sub-options by clicking. The Filter button on the top right corner can be clicked to filter the data by date and by country. You can view the data for up to the last six months and from five leading countries, namely The United States, France, Netherlands, Germany, and The United Kingdom. In addition to these, the tool has usual notifications, favorite, emails, etc. options.

Each parameter in SimilarWeb’s dashboard offers key insights into your website’s online presence and ranking and help you analyze where you stand in comparison to your competitors. You can use this information to find out your improvement zones and work on them to boost website rankings.

Why we love SimilarWeb and what we wish it would have

Pros:

• It’s fairly priced. After you wish to upgrade from the free package, depending on your requirement, you can move on to the Basic, Advanced, or the Ultimate package.
• The free version comes with a lot of good features.
• The interface is supremely easy to use.
• The data provided is on a very large scale. You can see sources of traffic, their geographical distribution, traffic from social media, etc.
• You can export reports and save them locally on your system or network.
• While there are a lot of applications that will give you competitor analysis, there are only a few that will give you industry analysis. SimilarWeb is one of the few ones. SimilarWeb does the industry analysis job and does it very well.
• If you are invested in the mobile market, SimilarWeb is really for you. It gives you app analysis so that you can draw conclusions about how you are doing in the mobile industry and what you can do to beat your competition.
• SimilarWeb also gives you a complete report on how your competitors are doing and marks them against you, so that you can see where you are doing better than others and where you have the potential to up your game a bit.

Cons:

• Sign-up issues
• While data can be seen up to the last six months, it is shows only in full-month time frames. You cannot set the date range for data.
• Estimates are provided on desktop traffic and not mobile and tablet traffic.
• SimilarWeb does not give you a count of individual visitors

• Estimate your competitors’ traffic with @SimilarWeb similarweb.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

We like the free version, and we urge you to try it out too. While there is a room for improvement, SimilarWeb is a good tool to have handy when you are just starting out to work on improving your online presence and performing competitor analysis. The free version has some limitations, but when you upgrade to one of the packages, you will be able to get the most out of the application.

When websites are designed, the basic steps involved are designing the concept, the interface, procuring the web space, and having basic knowledge of a website creation language, right? Well, partially. A lot of other crucial aspects need to be evaluated before it can be launched, like checking its performance and look on different browsers for example. If your website has everything a sleek website should have but fails to perform under extreme pressure, like maybe a thousand hits a second, you could be in trouble. You see, users don’t like to wait around for webpages to load. If there’s any other website offering the same information you have and yours is taking too much time to open up, a user will switch.

If you don’t want to be at the wrong end of such a scenario, find out how much load your website can handle at one time with LoadImpact.

LoadImpact – Load & Performance Testing Anytime, Anywhere

Load Impact is an online performance testing service that lets you test your website, web-app, mobile app or API over the Internet. It’s an on-demand service, where you can start testing instantly and there are no licenses, fees, or software to install. It ensures that your website’s bounce rate doesn’t increase, your rank in search engines doesn’t degrade, and your conversion rates don’t reduce by letting you know how quickly your webpages load so that you can take adequate optimization measures if they’re too slow.

One of the most attractive features of this service is that it is 100% cloud based. That means you don’t need to download, install, or configure anything. It runs on cloud servers over the Internet so you always have access to your test scenarios and test results. Thus you have all the flexibility in the world and you end up saving a lot of time.

Here’s an overview of the service’s features:

• Simulated traffic suited to real-time scenarios, no hidden caching or favorable behavior
• Load is generated from up to 10 different locations simultaneously, and more locations can be added on request
• Manual as well as automated scripting options with multilingual support
• Possible to record an HTTP session using Load Impact’s proxy recorder or Chrome Extension
• Provision to report performance issues within minutes
• Monitoring backend also possible while testing using New Relic and/or Load Impact server agents
• Users can collect metrics such as CPU usage, disk I/O, memory usage, network I/O, and APDEX
• Test scheduling and automation support
• Enables users to upload CSV files containing the data they wish to use – such as login credentials, product IDs, URLs, etc. – and associate it with the desired script
• Graph plotting included depicting performance trends over time
• Large scale load tests up to 1.2 million concurrent users
• Supports any HTTP-based application or service (e.g. Flash, AJAX, SOAP/XML apps, etc)
• Possibility to add extra IPs

With over 1,400,000 tests conducted successfully, Load Impact is the most popular load testing service over the Internet.

This is how it works

To try Load Impact first hand, just visit the tool’s homepage and enter your website’s URL in the box given for it. Then click on “Run free test”. After a couple of seconds you’ll be directed to a page where you’ll be able to see real-time results being updated on various graphs. The results will be shown for 25 simulated users across the world and the test will run for approximately 5 minutes. These values are for a trail account. To simulate more users and run the test for longer duration you’ll need to register.

There isn’t much you can do while the tests are running, so we waited. About halfway through the test, a pop-up appeared prompting us to check the URL tab and look for any failures or unexpected behavior. It also said that if we did find any failures we should register and run the tests again with more users, say 100, and probably use Load Impact’s Chrome extension. As it was clear that that was a selling strategy, we closed the pop-up and let the tests complete.

Once finished, in addition to the test scenario description we could see the places the users were simulated from, a graphical representation comparing the load time for each added user, and a results pane that had 4 tabs with several sub-sections:

• Metrics – bandwidth, requests per second, accumulated load time, content type load time, and TCP connections active (to access any of these we’d have to register for a free account)
• URLs – a list of all URLs of your web-pages that were tested, their response statuses, how much time each took to load in seconds, etc
• Pages – tested pages from your website
• Logs

Additionally, towards the right hand side there were 4 options to help us out with different tasks:

• Knowledge Base (Help Center)
• Load Script API (Lua Modules)
• System Status
• Questions section

Since we’d had a pretty decent idea about how the tool worked, we decided to not create any free account for the time being. However, we did later find out that signing up required no credit card details, was easy, and would give us the opportunity to test our website load with 100 virtual users, 2500 requests per second, and 5 tests per month. Not bad at all.

Evaluating Load Impact

The pros of the tool included:

• A great platform to test any website’s load handling capacity
• Cloud based, simulated users from across the globe
• Integration support with multiple tools
• Testing websites, web-apps, APIs and mobile apps possible

Whereas the downsides included:

• Slight learning curve to understand the jargons used
• Steep price slabs if someone needed to sign up

• What load can your website handle? Find out with @loadimpact loadimpact.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Word

Overall, Load Impact does prove to be a good performance testing platform, but not for novice users. There are a lot of people out there with blogs or personal websites, and not all of them understand the terms and technicalities of such tests. For them, the tool could be a waste of time. But for the ones that do realize its worth, it could be just what they need.

With the progress of innovation, smartphones and tablets have captured the imagination of users across the globe in such a manner that any website which does not cater to the requirements of these devices is considered outdated. Your website might be attracting huge traffic on computer web browsers, but unless it does so on tablets and smartphones too, its impact won’t nearly be as spread out as you would like. So it is necessary to ensure that you cover all possible ends there are to make your website suitable for mobile device browsers too. From the design to the interface, touch-screen response to animation, you’ll have to consider everything.

Say you’ve done all there is to make sure your mobile website looks and feels as good as the computer version and you’ve even tested it on all mobile operating systems and browsers. Now you’re good to go ahead and expect decent traffic to your website on both computer and mobile devices. You would of course want to know how you’re faring.
Enter “Mobile Ratio”.

Mobile Ratio – How mobile is your website?

Mobile Ratio is an amazing online tool which helps you in finding out what percentage of your website’s traffic is coming from which devices. This intuitive tool assists users to track their website’s traffic coming from Smartphones, Tablets and Desktops. In this sense it is a step ahead of conventional analytic tools which simply offer website traffic details but do not let the user know exactly the kind of device where the traffic is coming from. Knowing the device from where the traffic is coming is of great significance since users can expand their reach and audience simply by paying more attention to the least covered section and make improvements there.

This is how it rolls

As a first step, you need to sign into the tool using your Google account details. Once logged in, the tool prompts you to select the domain you want to analyze. Now an important thing to note here is, you’ll only be able to track the mobile traffic of those websites on which you already have the Google Analytics tracking code installed. That is, if you’ve tied up any of your domains for traffic tracking with Google Analytics, mobileratio.com will pull the data of those websites from Google Analytics and quickly display that in a simplified form.

So basically, after you sign in, the tool scans all domains linked with the Google account you used to sign in, picks out the ones which have Google Analytics installed and displays them in a drop down. Once this is done, you can select the domain you want to analyze.
Once you do so, Mobile Ratio makes use of Google Analytics to gather your website traffic details. It then goes a step further and breaks down the report based on the kind of device used to access your website and displays the report with the percentage breakdown. The report is presented to you as an attractive graph divided into 3 colors, each representing a device. The graph has percentage values on the Y axis and months on the X axis which helps you get a crisp picture of where your actual audience lies. A similar colored pie chart also depicts the same information but over a time span of the last 30 days, making everything more comprehensible.

A good thing here is that you don’t need to register or sign up. You can just use your Google account details to sign in and your data is not even saved. It’s a one-time sign so no security concerns there!
And of course, offering such a cooperative tool at no cost makes the effort of its makers all the more appreciable!

Additional Features

If you thought that was all there was to it, well you’re wrong! Some really awesome features of mobileratio.com include its social features. You can choose to save the report publicly or privately and also share it via a link which is provided when you click on any of the buttons given below. You can analyze as many websites as you want with this tool for absolutely no cost. Yes, it is totally free!

Also, if you look at the picture above, there is a link which facilitates checking how mobile-friendly your website is. Clicking on this link takes you to Google Mobile-Friendly Test page where your website is analyzed for mobile friendliness. The best part about this test is that you will be given a sneak peek at how your website appears to Googlebot and you’ll be given pointers for improving your shortfalls. Wonderful!

• Quickly check how much mobile traffic is your website getting mobileratio.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Summing it Up

There’s a difference between having a website and having a great website. One which caters beautifully to all devices, operating systems and browsers and is still able to capture its target audience is a website worth the time and effort. And Mobile Ratio is a brilliant tool for people who want to do just that! Try it out today and experience its utility.

Which position in Google search results receives how many clicks? How does it look for organic results and for ads? What are the differences between desktop and mobile?
Take a look at our infographic below.

Scroll down for Twitter TAKEAWAYS (or click here)

for a larger version click here

Feel free to use this infographic on your blog or website,
but please don’t forget to link to www.supermonitoring.com.

TWITTER TAKEAWAYS

• Google organic results desktop clicks distribution: 1st position 34%, 2nd 15%, 3rd 10.5%, 4th 7.5%, 5th 6%, 6-10th 4% http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• Google organic results mobile clicks distribution: 1st position 31.5%, 2nd 15.5%, 3rd 11%, 4th 8%, 5th 6%, 6-10th 5%. http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• Ads can cut the CTR on the first organic result nearly in half, while other positions are far less impacted. http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• Ads displayed above organic results seem to hurt organic CTR more than ads on the right. http://95mh.gu.ma/ via @supermonitoring

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• Searches with multiple ads reduce organic CTR as they drive the organic results further down the page. http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• Searches with just one ad seem to produce a higher CTR for the first organic result than searches with no ads at all. http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• 17.2% of the clicks on desktop searches are attributed to ads, with the top 3 ads accounting for 11.69% of clicks. http://95mh.gu.ma/

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• On desktops, the 1st ad on Google SERPs receives ~5.5% of all clicks. 2nd ad ~3.5% and 3rd ~3%. http://95mh.gu.ma/ via @supermonitoring

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• On mobile, the 1st ad on Google SERPs receives ~5.5% of all clicks. 2nd ad ~3.5% and 3rd ~2%. http://95mh.gu.ma/ via @supermonitoring

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Sources:

The study by Philip Petrescu of Caphyon
Google Organic CTR History
Google Keyword Planner

If you like this infographic, you might also like:

• State of Mobile 2013
• Wikipedia – Facts and Figures
• LinkedIn – Facts and Figures

The collection, analysis and measurement of the web data to understand and optimize the web usage utilizing the reports hence generated. Web Analytics is a multipurpose tool which can be used for measuring the web traffic, perform market research, to enhance the impact a website has on the visitors and also to measure the impact an advertising campaign has. Web Analytics helps you keep a watch on the traffic on your website and also reveals the popular trends useful for market research.

It provides the number of visits and page views a website has. Web analytics can be divided into two categories, namely on-site and off-site web analytics. Off-site analytics includes visibility of the website, comments about the website and potential audience of a website while on-site web analytics deals with the measurements about a visitor’s behavior on your website. This includes the force driving the traffic and conversions. Many tools are used these days for performing on-site analytics while Google Analytics is the most popularly used application in this domain, but there are much more advanced tools available these days which give you many additional information such as heat maps.

KISSmetrics is one such analytics tool which helps you in identifying and understanding the traffic and improve the same by enabling you to take an informed decision about marketing and quality of your product. KISSmetrics tells you about what steps a person or future customer who visits you your website takes after landing on your website and before buying your product. Using KISSmetrics you can easily track what a customer does on your website till end until you get paid. KISSmetrics can also be used to track sign up procedures and you it keeps you informed about successful sign ups and what time the person took in signing up for your website so that you can make changes in the future and have a more hassle free signup process. It can track till where the customer completed the signup and where he left so that you know what is keeping you away from increasing your sales. The number of times people log into your website via Facebook or Twitter is also recorded by the KISSmetrics.

KISSmetrics and Your Website

Just getting signups from the people visiting your website is not enough for increasing your sales. You should look for ways to ease up the process after sign up. People should easily be able to find what they are looking for. If you are selling a service or software there should be options to upgrade and details about service configuration. You need to make sure that the core features of your website are being utilized well and people are able to complete this core process which is the essence of your business.

One should be able to locate the products, search for the desired product, view individual product details and your product should be easily downloadable or added to the cart and the complete purchase procedure should be hassle free and completed within a time limit. KISSmetrics would help you fix all these issues and help you keep your customers happy and yourself wealthy.

Unsubscribes and Refunds

KISSmetrics also helps you track the events which lead to cancelling of orders, generating refunds, and unsubscribing the newsletter services. It allows you to ensure that these events do not occur again and you are able to increase your sales next time a customer visits your website.

Events & Data

The Data you get from KISSmetrics gives you the full details about your user for example who he is, where he is from and what he does. Using KISSmetrics you can also form a group of users having similar characteristics. Multiple identities of the same person are merged automatically.
All events involving subscription, signup, sales, downloads and even browsing the homepage and landing page are recorded. The details such as where the user is from , his or her age, if he was a returning visitor and many other such properties about the user are included in the report generated by KISSmetrics.

Unlike Google Analytics KISSmetrics does not include Time on Site, Time on Page, Exits, Bounce Rates and Bounces. You’ll have to perform an analysis of the funnel report generated on KISSmetrics to get these quantities.

KISSmetrics and Social Media

KISSmetrics can be used to track social media for Return on Investment (ROI). This would help you analyze which social media platform gives you the maximum traffic on your website and thus whenever a person who comes to your website through social media is tracked for the source and the particular social media website is credited with the same . Using KISSmetrics you can track the whole life cycle of a customer.

Paid Advertising and KISSmetrics

You can also track your return on investment for online advertising channels . These channels include Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Reddit Ads, Yahoo! Bing Network, Twitter Promoted Tweet and more. This allows you to track the best traffic source for you and which advertising source brings you the best return on investment. KISSmetrics tracks people at any point of time and originating from a paid search or a Pay Per Click advertisement a month back.You can find out who converts from a paid advertising service on a day to day basis.

• Track what users do on your website using the best Google Analytics alternative – @KISSmetrics www.kissmetrics.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Plans and Pricing

Offers 14 day unlimited trial without any obligation and credit card. You have an option to choose from monthly or yearly billing. And you are charged 150$ per month for the starter pack while 250$ per month for the basic pack and $500 for professional pack. You’ll be able to track about 500,000 events per month subscribing for starter plan while if you subscribe for basic you can track up to 1 million events and 1+ million events for a professional plan.

KISSmetrics is one of the most popular and trustworthy web analytics website. It is very result oriented and you can see the changes within a short span of time. They say Google Analytics only tells you what’s happening while KISSmetrics tell you who. I found this web application very powerful and worth giving a competition to Google’s Analytics Service. Try out KISSmetrics and let us know your views too.

Promoting your company through blogs, podcasts, video, newsletters, SEO, eBooks and Social Media is called Inbound Marketing. The ultimate purpose of inbound marketing is to bring customers closer to the brand. Inbound marketing earns a lot of attention from the customers and makes it easy for them to find your company. It helps you to get new customers through the interesting content you would post on your social media, blogs, newsletters or more.

Marketing Analytics is another concept that is very essential for your business or company. It comprises of all the technologies and process that would allow you to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns and initiatives.

Moz (Moz.com) is one of the most popular companies offering Inbound Marketing and Marketing Analytics. This company is based in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. and was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in the year 2004. Founded with the name SEOmoz and as a company that would deal with Search Engine Optimization in the year 2013 the company expanded its business to Analytics, Social Branding, and Link Building. It also acquired GetListed, A Portland based company that helps local businesses get good serach engine ranks.

Moz.com gives insights to social media, search engines and link building efforts. A premium Moz account would help you know the organic search engine rankings and take necessary steps to increase the same. These tools would help you know what changes you need to make on your website and content concentrating on the keywords, web page optimization and link building.

Moz Analytics

Moz Analytics is a marketing analytics software that gets all the inbound marketing data in one place with beautiful custom reports and insights that help you while researching the actions and changes you should take to improve the performance of your website or blog. It shows how your presence on social networks is impacting your Search engine rankings. It also shows you through what medium your content is being shared on the internet and what gets you more visits on your website. Competitive analysis with your competitors can be one of the key to your success at Moz as you know where the competitors are getting visitors from and you would know where you need to focus to outpace competitors.

Moz Local

This allows you to keep a check on how your business is listed on various search engines like google, Bing and other local serach engines. This helps you in improving your business listings and increase your business.

Followeronk

Followeronk gives you a deep insight into your twitter accounts and lets you know who follows you, gives their locations, their Tweet timings so that you know at what time you should tweet to attract more people to your content. Using Followeronk you can search new influencers in your niche and can compare you social insights to others so that you can take necessary actions to beat the competition in your business.

Open Site Explorer

This tool compares the backlinks on your website with your competitors for targeted and intelligent link building. It identifies popular pages, gets social activity data and analyzes the anchor texts. This tool is mainly used to research and perform link analysis.

MozBar and Mozcast

Mozbar is an SEO toolbar that you can use to view your link metrics, access all SEO tools that you like at a single place while browsing the internet. It also allows you to analyze a webpage and gives Search Engine Results Page for a certain query.
Mozcast on the other hand allows you to track changes and fluctuations in the google rankings on a daily basis.

Some Premium Tools

Apart from these basic free for a month tools there are certain tools which are available on Moz only to the Moz Pro subscribers.

Fresh Web Explorer

This tool is used to analyze the mention of your business and competitors on the web. It also finds out the latest trending content in your niche that is published on the internet. This uses Freshscape index that contains over RSS feeds and over URLs. Knowing who is talking what about your brand on the website helps a lot in getting customer and visitor feedback so that you can make changes accordingly.

Rank Trackers

This tool informs us about the web page rankings and also about the keyword rankings and stores them in a format that you can compare the previous and current rating easily.

On Page Grader

This gives you insights about keyword usage on your page and helps you to rank higher by optimizing your content accordingly for targeted search terms.

Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis

It is a tool that lets you know how difficult it would be if you want to increase your ranking based on certain specific keywords that may have been used on 10 competitors’ website.

Crawl Test

Crawl Tests unleash the crawler called RogerBot on any URL and it detects the HTTP status codes, Content type, Metadata and other issues which may interfere with how the serach engine bots crawl a website. The reports hence generated are sent to your registered email.

• moz.com/ – the wonderful solution for inbound marketing and marketing analytics. @moz via @supermonitoring

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Whiteboard Fridays and Community

Whiteboard Fridays are the videos created by the Moz team in which they illustrate the SEO related concepts on whiteboards every Friday.
Moz Community includes Webinars, O&A sessions and Events which are organized by the Moz team to deal with issues that usually people face while performing SEO and optimize their websites.

Pricing

The Moz Pro subscription costs around $99 per month and offers basic free tools and premium tools too. This package includes all the tools listed above. The website also offers a 30 day free trial which doesn’t includes the premium tools which were listed above. Moz Local is available in a different package which costs 49$ per year for a single location.

Now if you want to have wonderful conversion rates and rank higher on Google and other search engines, I would recommend you to try Moz.com as it is one of the most awesome online tools which is priced appropriately and you would surely get the desired results within a small span of time.