CanIRank Review: My Case Study With DIY SEO Software

CanIRank is an AI-powered search engine optimization software for small businesses and startups that is said to improve Google rankings. 

“Improve rankings and achieve page 1 ranking for any keyword” is a bold statement. 

Even the most famous SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush don’t promise ranking improvements because it’s quite risky.

The results might differ even if you and I follow the same SEO optimization strategies. 

Therefore, I am usually skeptical when someone promises outstanding results.

Nevertheless, CanIRank landing page copywriters did an excellent job and appealed to my deepest needs as an SEO specialist. I could not resist trying out the tool and seeing if it delivers on its promise.  

I tested the tool and wrote this CanIRank review to share whether it’s worth using it and how it’s different from other SEO software. 

Here is the table of contents for your convenience.

• What is CanIRank
• How does CanIRank work
• CanIRank pricing

What is CanIRank?

CanIRank is a DIY AI-powered SEO software developed by Stanford engineers in 2010. 

Matt Bentley, the founder of CanIRank, is a serial entrepreneur who has built multiple businesses from startups to 8-figure revenues in 5 years and accumulated valuable SEO skills that he later used to create CanIRank.  

According to the company about page, the idea to launch CanIRank came after analyzing 50,000 rows of SEO data and one question, “I wonder what kind of patterns can we find here?” 

This short story resonated with me as an SEO specialist. I know how challenging it might be to collect and analyze SEO data. It often seems that every piece of data is essential, but putting it together where it would make sense is a lot of hard work. 

I was wondering if there was a tool that could make my life easier. 

CanIRank was developed to help you analyze your website and your competitors and recommend actions that should help you boost your website’s performance in organic search results. 

It is said that CanIRank employs a powerful machine learning algorithm to analyze 400,000 websites to discover what works and offer personalized recommendations for webmasters. 

I registered to review Canirank features and see what recommendations it would suggest for my website. 

Here is an in-depth review of CanIRank reports and features. 

How does CanIRank work?

When I write creator tool reviews, I always test software myself to understand how it works and whether it provides value for people. 

This time is no different. 

CanIRank has a free version that is powerful enough to test the tool. They also have paid plans that I’ll cover later in this article. 

Once I registered and verified my email, I was asked to provide my website URL for analysis. 

The analysis took roughly 5 minutes to complete.

As an SEO specialist, I know my website’s weak points quite well. 

My website’s authority is relatively low, and the content publication rate is slow. Since I run many projects in parallel, I am physically unable to dedicate more than a few hours a week to my website. 

Nevertheless, my website is slowly but steadily growing. 

I was curious to learn what CanIRank will offer me as improvement tips.

Surprisingly, it highlighted plenty of my website’s weak points. Here they are.

The general CanIRank report is pretty helpful for website owners.

It highlights the weakest points and assigns a score to show how critical the issue is. 

In my case, the strongest area is optimization, which is true because every page of my website is optimized to rank in search engine results. 

CanIRank defined content, authority, and social as weak areas to work on, with social being the weakest one. 

As a website owner, I agree with these estimates for the following reasons:

• My website has 40 pages as of September 2022 and needs more high-quality content to grow.
• My website’s domain rating is 20 as of September 2022, which is considered low.
• I don’t grow branded social media accounts.

This information is a goldmine for someone not familiar with SEO who wants to know the current state of their website. 

You don’t need to have a paid plan to run this report. 

The feature is free.

Besides, you can run these reports for competitor websites too. CanIRank does not ask to verify the domain ownership.

There are a few more insightful features and reports I want to show you.

CanIRank the “improve my rankings” report

The ranking position is an essential metric for website owners. 

We all want our web pages to rank high for the target keywords. However, it’s often easier said than done. 

Despite low website authority, many of my website pages rank on the Google first search result page thanks to a proven content creation strategy that I describe in my ebook.

I regularly check my website performance and brainstorm improvement strategies.

To test the CanIRank tool, I took this in-depth guide about Medium writing. This was one of the first articles I published on my website. I’ve been writing on Medium for two years and already got a top writer status. Therefore, I knew what to write about.

Here is how my page performs, according to Ahrefs:

While checking this article’s performance, I see I should update content since Medium changed a lot in the past year, include additional keywords and build more backlinks. 

Once again, I know it because I have years of experience in SEO. 

Someone else might not understand why their page drops in search and what needs to be updated.

Surprisingly, CanIRank defined the recommended improvements pretty well. Here is what the report showed me for the following input data:

• Target keyword: how to make money on Medium

• URL: https://selfmademillennials.com/how-to-make-money-writing-on-medium-website/

CanIRank shows how my web page performs compared to competitors and whether the content I created is relevant to the target keyword. The higher the score, the better your web page’s performance is. 

In my particular case, the page relevancy score is 53 out of 100, which means the page is relevant and optimized for the target keyword. However, I still have to work on improving the website’s authority. 

CanIRank analyzed the keywords I used on the page and recommended some new related keywords I missed. It’s a super helpful addition to the report, which will save time in the future since I won’t need to conduct keyword research on my own. 

If you want to create optimized content but struggle with keyword research, this CanIRank feature will help you discover the most suitable keywords for your content piece. 

Overall, the CanIRank “Improve my rankings” report impressed me with its accuracy and actionable tips, which will yield a high impact if implemented. 

CanIRank the “promote my content” report 

The “promote my content” report is dedicated to helping you find opportunities to build backlinks, connect with influencers, and boost your web page performance in organic search results. 

If you’ve ever tried to build backlinks, you know how time-consuming and challenging this process is. Many site owners ignore link-building requests because they get too many of them and are simply not interested.

As an SEO specialist, I always look for ways to build high-quality backlinks to my website. Therefore, I was pretty interested in learning what CanIRank has to offer. 

I input the following information for the analysis, telling CanIRank that I want my article to get featured on the resource pages. 

Alternatively, you can choose competing pages, competing websites, forums, guest posts, unlinked mentions, communities, and directories as a link-building strategy. 

Here is the list of 32 opportunities CanIRank discovered for me:

The results from the “promote my content” report. 

CanIRank claims these are the best link-building opportunities for my web page. 

You can see the URL, the page type, page relevancy, authority, how many external backlinks are do-follow, and whether the page is actionable. 

As a next step, I have to review the recommended URLs and reach out to webmasters for a backlink agreement. This is an ideal case scenario. However, you must check and analyze every URL before deciding on backlink placement.

As a writer on Medium, I know that anyone can publish a post and create a backlink from the Medium website. Medium. However, a no-follow backlink won’t boost your website’s DR. It will only redirect the traffic if you have an active blog. 

Some recommended directories are not live anymore, while other sites are not relevant.

After reviewing a list with 32 recommended URLs, I found the following luring opportunities for backlink placement:

1. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-use-medium

2. https://buffer.com/resources/how-to-use-medium/

Hubspot and Buffer are famous and trustworthy websites. 

A backlink from any of these blogs will definitely help me boost my website’s DR. However, getting backlinks from these sites is highly challenging but worth trying.

If your goal is to find backlink opportunities for your website, I encourage you to check CanIRank “Promote my content” report. 

You’ll get plenty of recommendations based on your input parameters. However, it does not mean you should work on all of them. I recommend checking every URL and picking trustworthy and relevant ones for your niche. 

CanIRank the “grow my content” report

There is one more helpful feature I am sure content creators will love. 

CanIRank’s “grow my content” report helps to estimate whether your website has chances to rank for a particular keyword in search results. 

As an SEO specialist, I can do prompt research and estimate the ranking likelihood on my own. I’ve been doing it successfully for my clients and my website for years. 

However, keyword research and analysis are challenging for someone unfamiliar with SEO.

That’s where tools like CanIRank come in handy. 

You don’t need to understand the technical details behind the analysis. Plug your keyword into the “Grow my content” field and hit “Can I Rank?”

In my example below, I input a keyword for which I knew my website could rank. I conducted keyword research some time ago, and “niche keyword research” was among my go-to keywords for content writing. 

However, I took this keyword for the matter of experiment to see what CanIRank would tell me.

It took CanIRank a few seconds to analyze the keyword, my website, top ranking competitors and generate the following report for me:

The screenshot above is the first part of the report, which shows the ranking probability. 

In my case, my website has a 65% chance of ranking for the “niche keyword research” keyword. As an SEO specialist, I’d say it is a very accurate percentage. I’d name the same number. 

Here is why.

I cover SEO writing on my website and share content related to on-page optimization and keyword research and analysis. So, some website pages and categories are related to the target keyword. 

I also do optimization well, which helps my website pages rank high on Google. However, my site’s DR (domain rating) is relatively low compared to competitors, which makes ranking on the first search result page challenging. 

CanIRank analyzed all these aspects. That’s where 65% probability comes from.

If you don’t know whether it’s worth creating content for a particular topic for your website, run a quick analysis via CanIRank. It will help you assess the ranking potential for your target keyword. Based on my experience, it’s pretty reliable.

CanIRank pricing

Unlike famous industry giants like Ahrefs, CanIRank is an affordable solution for solopreneurs, startups, and small companies.

As a website owner, you can check the current state of your website and get actionable recommendations for free.  

As an SEO specialist, I was positively impressed with how the information was presented. The reports were easy to read and insightful.

For instance, the “improve my rankings” report contained tons of metrics to understand my website’s current strengths and weaknesses, along with a to-do list of tips to improve the rankings of a particular web page. 

Those were not shallow tips like “acquire do-follow backlinks.” Instead, I’ve got a keyword list to use, content length recommendations, competitor comparison, and more. 

If you are looking for SEO software with an outstanding balance between price and value, I’d recommend starting with CanIRank free trial. 

If you are interested in exploring the paid features, here is the CanIRank pricing.

If you are a solopreneur like me and the CanIRank free version does not cover your needs, you can upgrade to the DIY Individual package, which covers only one website and unlocks all features. 

The DIY Pro and DIY Agency packages are suitable for startups, small companies, and marketing agencies that want to work with multiple websites under one account. 

CanIRank gifts 7 days of free software usage for everyone who upgrades to a paid plan. You can learn more about their up-to-date prices and offers on the CanIRank pricing page.

Have you used CanIRank or any other tools optimization tools?

Let me know in the comments. Your opinion and feedback are important and will help others find the best tool.