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.
To answer many of the comments - yes, we're planning to do almost all of the items that have been asked about above.
Our first priority is making the individual data points clickable, to take you to our "cache" of the data from the source. Second, we'll be making the service track multiple sites at a time, up to 3 per member at first, and when we launch our staggered memberships (corporate, enterprise, agency, etc) later this year, those accounts will have the ability to track many more sites at once.
Finally, we will have all of the data exportable as a CSV and potentialy in XML format. Making PDFs of the graphs hasn't been our list, but we're definitely going to look into it.
Thanks for the positive and constructive feedback, everyone! We've had more than 200 sites sign up since this blog post a few hours ago and it's terrific to see how we can help you make the most of it.
Rand and All the people at SEOmoz behind this, Well done!
I look forward to using this and seeing it in action more,
One question - what has been done to "internationalize" this? ie if I enter website.co.uk - is the google links automatically from google.co.uk? Then if i track website.de is yahoo links automatically from yahoo.de??
Be interesting to see..
That is a 100% interesting question. It would never have occured to me to geolocate google usage.
That old joke about trilingual/bilingual/monolingual comes to mind.
-OT
It's frustrating when using a lot of SEO software, tracking etc at the moment when it's purely focused on google.com and american statistics. Not that it's not a valuable area, but sometimes it's nice to look elsewhere :)
edit: in fact its really not about "internationalisation" at all - its actually about "localization"
Groovy.
I think there's definitely room to grow the product into something truly indispensible but even right now it looks pretty useful!
One thing which would be handy would be the ability to export the data to csv. I imagine that a lot of people will still want to report on this data to clients and having the data in a format they can use will save time.
edit: to remove too many uses of the word "handy"
And the csv would allow manipulation. Excellent point Tom.
How about a pdf export too so we can preserve the pretty graphs and have something to pass around the office?
File Print > print to PDF (creates PDF)
- my issue is more 'core philosphy' - Please don't send a email saying you have a new feature then when I get here the site is slow, especially when the email you sent advertises some server load balancing. Please drink your own juice and buy more servers.
-oh yeah; how do I add more than one url?
.rb
rbowles - sorry about that, we had some funny activity on the site today (unrelated to the email or the tools - the email was only sent to PRO members).
We are looking at load balancing ASAP, but need to do a lot of work on our backend to make sure we can support the move. It is a high priority for us, however and you have my apologies for the delays.
Rand - this is really good news - it would save time and money that is wasted in manually populating the data.
I see a 100% relevancy of the application to my recent post on SWOT, this tool in a way makes the SWOT process a lot more easier for small businesses.
I would love to give it a whirl!
Great move (I did like the green worm who loves data :) )
A few questions:
- why are T rank, blog reactions and authority data the same? (their explanations all brought me to Technorati help, so I couldn't understand the difference)
- are you planning to introduce some comparative feature (for several brand names)?
A comparative feature would be great. One of my clients has two sites with plans to launch a third... tracking all three domains/brands in the same tool would be awesome.
This is cool! I'm patiently waiting for the ability to add more URLs because I can't decide which site do to first...they may have to roshambo each other.
thumbs up for roshambo usage.
Hi Rand, This is fantastic, looks good, I can now ditch those pesky spreadsheets :)
Quick question, I see SEO analytics in the pro dashboard but I don't see how we can add a url? Is this manual at this stage?
Many Thanks
EDIT > Ah, found it here: https://www.seomoz.org/analytics
Hi, I agree with that for Tracking Data Essential to serach Marketing campaingns. Because of that SEO analytics is importent to track is possible. Thanks & Regards M A Rahaman hptt://www.seoipro.com [email protected]
it looks to be really useful... for one site....
Hopefully we will be able to track multiple sites in the very near future
Keep the SEOmoz upgrades coming. I just upgraded my membership and I'm very excited to begin exploring all the new goodies. I just wish that I could clone myself so that I had the time to read all the great information on SEOmoz every single day. Alright, that's the end of my brown-nosing comments.
I think this has tremendous potential, and will definitely save me time and effort as well as providing info I wouldn't normally have the time to look at as often as I should.
Congrats & kudos to the Mozzers for bringing this to fruition - yet again it's fresh and right on the mark. If Tom C is bandying words like 'indispensible' about then that's a pretty good launch.
I'll definitely be keen to see how it develops especially with the exporting data possibility, and localisation would be a major boon too.
As an aside, this is my first post. Yeah, I know, I'm a bit of a lurker. But this seems like such a good idea I thought I'd best show my support.
Sweet! Reporting is always a bugbear without visual tools and easy integration with other services... the combination of CSV data and visual output looks dead interesting from where I'm sat.
Hi Rand and SEOmoz team,
Just wanted to say a big "well done" from me and from Compucall team in Israel. While we have a few automated toos which pull similar data you certainly pulled out a tool which saves time and looks good visually as well - For a lot of marketing executives who do not understand SEO these nice charts can visually show the fruits of the action.
And as we all live in this digital world, nothing I like more than to see a tool which automates day-to-day taks which are hard to track one by one.
Keep it up and let us know when an API is planned...
Ophir @ Compucall, Israel.
Wow... a very valuable tool. I was considering upgrading to a pro membership - frankly now it's mandatory. Great offering.
This is awesome and very timely. I'll be taking the tool for a spin for my new employer very shortly and will be happy to give you plenty of Beta tester feedback. It's great to see all of this functionality in a single tool.
Sounds like an awesome product. Any tool that makes our lives easier as SEO's is a great for the industry!
Excellent tool Rand.. That seems like a more insightful SE saturation tool.
Lets await more tools:)
How come you dont give a free trial? Usually the practice with tools of this kind. :-)
From what is said and shown about it it seems like the pagestrength tool you have combined with a a bit of marketleap graph stuff.
I kinda have those anyway. Am I missing something?
https://www.seomoz.org/analytics goes nowhere, it's dead :)
Rand Fishkin you wrote a comprehensive article and raise important issues. I will use SEO Analytics to know the number of people that came to my website but I find some issues. Through your solutions I will resolve these issues.
Great Tool and now with multiple domain addition capability, it's added stars to it.
Can we have a facility to add a sharing facility for a particular domain analytics ? for e.g. as Google Analytics has facility to share the analytics report.
Love this!
great tool. this will help to support ideas for a link building campaign and measure the effects of it. keep the great tools coming. the membership is definitely worth it.
This really might be the tipping point where I have to get a SEOmoz pro account. This was something that has needed to be created and I have no doubt that this product is going to keep building to encompass more and more functionality. SheerSEO has been nice, but one function that can track every aspect of a site that doesn't show up in the Google Analytics is awesome.
I'm assuming that this will eventually include Digg counts, Delicious bookmarks, and StumbleUpon tallies?
This looks to an professional tool for tracking your currently seo on customer/ or own pages.
its really nice rand :)
You really are trying to be the one-stop shop for our SEO needs...thanks! It's appreciated. I can't wait to start reading some great how-to's by people using this tool. In fact, I should probably get on that.
great move from SEOMOZ.
I am using the same kind of tool, it is called Yooda, but is only in French. I have few remarks that you might already have thought about or you are thinking of :
I like the "The count of links from blogs" , as it will become more and more necessary!
I just added the primary site I do SEO work for... wow, it was easy. Great tool, folks.
Now I want to buy the ability to track more domains/brands. How long before I can do that?
I am interested to know this also, and are we allowed to setup subdomains, or just secondary names?
I vote for subdomain support too! :)
Your already paying, it should be free for up to 10 domains..etc.
This is the tipping point for premium users being worth what we pay.
Looks very interesting - and bizarrely very similar to an in-house tool which we've been working on for a while. I'll have to try this out and see if we can utilise both to get everything we need..
Sounds like an awesome tool.
Green bug is a killer...
Great tool!
When will we be able to track multiple domains? :)
Thanks Rand and the SEOmoz team. You saved me a lot of work...again, trying to run the index and link data by hand.
Great tool Rand, another way to track results for our Marketing campaigns. The comparison feature will be great, that way we would know how are we standing towards competitors.
Looks interesting and a great idea.
Looks promising!
Estamos de acuerdo. Un proyecto de posicionamiento web, conlleva unos protocolos de actuación. El primero determinar mediante un estudio de Marketing, los términos a elegir, sino por mucho éxito que tenga el proyecto no dejará de ser un "palo de ciego".
Desde España. Un saludo.www.profesionalnet.net