For the last few months, SEOmoz has been working on a new product/tool for search marketers that we’ve always felt was essential to search marketing campaigns. I’ll try to explain succinctly:
THE PROBLEMS
Search campaigns have a great number of elements that contribute to their success or failure – indexing, links, brand growth, competition, algo shifts, etc. Right now, search marketers can easily track their visitor metrics – how many visits come to their sites and what actions they take there (as well as the referring source), but tracking less tangible data about a site’s performance in the search results or from third-party sources is far more difficult.
In addition, many search marketers are tasked with tracking and recording data manually about their own sites and their competitors – indexing counts, link numbers, brand mentions, blogosphere appearances, etc. It’s time consuming and hard to relate the data back to campaigns to measure effectiveness without spending lots of time in Excel.
THE SOLUTION
Get software that automates the tracking process for important third-party data. Like… SEO Analytics!
I started seeing this a few years back, when clients I was working with asked us to track information from the engines and other sources, then noted that many other search marketers, both on the agency and in-house sides, used their incredibly valuable time to do the same thing. So… Why not make it easy? That’s what SEO Analytics is supposed to do. It tracks each of the following metrics every three days for any site and brand combination you enter (in beta, it’s one per PRO member, but we’ll be upgrading to more in the near future):
- Brand Data
- Google Brand Mentions – How many times your brand appears in Google’s index
- Google Blog Mentions – How many times your brand appears in Google’s Blogsearch
- Google News Mentions – How many times your brand appears in Google’s News Service
- Google Web Mentions – How many times your domain name is mentioned across the web
- Link Data
- Yahoo! Site Explorer – Yahoo! Site Explorer’s count of inbound links.
- Yahoo! Websearch Links – Yahoo! Websearch’s count of inbound links. We use both statistics from Site Explorer and Yahoo! Websearch, as the two can provide very different counts at times
- Technorati Links – The count of links from blogs tracked by Technorat
- Google Blogsearch Links – Number of links according to Google’s Blogsearch
- Indexing Data
- Index count according to Google
- Index count according to Yahoo! Site Explorer
- Index count according Yahoo!
- Index count according to Live / MSN
- Index count according to Ask.com
THE VISUALS
I really like seeing data like this:
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Above, you can see the number of mentions of SEOmoz in Google News over the past few months – very helpful if you’re trying to watch not just individual mentions for reputation management, but a PR campaign’s growth and penetration over time.
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In this example (above), I’m looking at the number of pages MSN/Live’s search index is reporting indexing on SEOmoz. I think the counts are way off (we don’t have anything close to 140,000 pages), but the greater indexing numbers match with slightly higher long tail traffic in our reporting, so it’s good information to have. We can also monitor in case of a big drop and try to diagnose the problem – something that would have been extremely useful to have in many of our previous clients’ campaigns.
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Remember when SEOmoz added a lot of noindex tags and nofollows to our less important pages? Hey look! There it is in Google, showing us lower indexing estimates just a few days/weeks after we made the changes. The numerical chart format is for those who need to see the exact data, and in this case, it’s a more useful visualization than the graph view.
I’m personally of the opinion that SEO Analytics is one of our coolest and most useful products. It’s value in the first run isn’t incredible – it’s just showing you data, but over time, having access to fresh crawls of the information every 3 days is pretty remarkable, and makes a lot of campaign intelligence activity more accessible and easier to retrieve.
Feedback is certainly welcome, and we hope to be releasing a big upgrade to SEO Analytics in the next couple months or so to allow you to track multiple sites and brand names at once (and compare their data), pushing the tool from self analysis to competitive intelligence as well.
p.s. I should mention that SEO Analytics is available to PRO members only, but if you were at SMX West last week, your combined badge code will still get you a free month-long trial of the service.
