When we first started back in 2009, there were just few competitors for us, you could easily count them on the fingers of one had. Today there are tons of tools that, on the first sight, don’t differ much from SEO Rank Monitor. They all check rankings, one better than other.
When we decided to redesign SEO Rank Monitor in 2013, the main question we asked ourselves was, what is the main reason that our customers use our service, or in fact any other rank tracker? The obvious answer isn’t always the right one. People don’t use rank trackers to discover how their websites rank for certain keywords, it’s just another piece of data. The real question is, what do they do with that information?
In case of rank tracking solutions, the answer is simple, they analyze it in order to find out which of their seo campaigns are most effective. Presenting ranking data in just the right way and equipping the analyst with a set of tools that will help him/her understand it, is were SEO Rank Monitor really out-competes its rivals.
Knowing where you rank is one thing, knowing what made it happen is what’s really important
Most rank tracking providers show ranking changes along the current ranking data, comparing current rankings to those from the last check (previous day/week, depending on how often rankings are checked). Although it gives you some information on how your rankings are doing compared to yesterday, it doesn’t tell you anything useful. In order to see how ranking of any keyword has moved over time, you would need to zoom in on that particular keyword, one by one.
Nowadays seo isn’t any more about particular keywords, it’s about the seo campaign as whole. That’s why we decided to introduce a feature that, imho, is a real gem.
It is actually that simple and useful that I don’t understand why others don’t have it.
Comparing any date report to any other date in the past will help you analyze ranking data more efficiently, find out which of your seo efforts worked and which didn’t. Combined with tags and events in SEO Rank Monitor it will become every seo’s best friend.
Let me give you a real live example using one of sites I monitor myself. The website in question is a project of my wife, which she started during her pregnancy, it’s about pregnancy. The website is built in WordPress and about two weeks ago I decided to test another theme. The main reason was to optimize AdSense earnings but I figured out that it would have some impact on the current rankings as the structure of the new theme (navigation etc.) was way different from the original one.
When I finalized all changes to the website, I made sure to note the date using Event-feature in my SRM dashboard. The change of theme was a real bulls eye when it comes to AdSense, the CTR doubled overnight and stayed at higher rate ever since.
Just today I decided to compare current rankings with those of the day I applied the changes to the theme. I was, again, happy with what I saw! The change of theme didn’t only have a positive outcome on the AdSense CTR and earnings, it also had a huge impact on the rankings as well.
The changes resulted in 18 new keywords, from 137 that I monitor for this website, to climb into top 100 results and a net ranking change of +412 for all keywords in total. Not bad for just changing a theme.
Comparing your rankings to any date in the past is really useful, especially giving the fact that most changes you apply to your seo campaign, whenever it’s on-page or off-page optimization, will not result in ranking change overnight. In most cases it takes a week or two to know if the changes you made resulted in higher/lower rankings.