I'm embarrassed to say that sometimes, I really don't do a good job of putting SEOmoz's best foot forward. Case-in-point: this past week, our SERPs Analysis Tool, one of the most requested, most exciting and most useful projects we've ever crafted had a new release that now includes social data in the report. Thomas and Evan, two remarkable engineers at Moz, have done some kickass work to make sure this product can scale, handle high load requests and (usually) returns with a full report in under 24 hours (it's been returning in less than 30 minutes for me!).
At the fundamental level, every SEO has been in this situation:
In trying to understand Google's ranking algorithm for a specific query, we often create hacked-together Excel spreadsheets of data from numerous sources in an attempt to identify a pattern, and hopefully, find the answer to the next question - "How Can I Get My Site Ranking Here?"
The SERPs Analysis Tool saves hours of time, and pulls metrics that would be incredibly hard to collect in one place. It makes a nice, pretty, interactive interface and it's already part of PRO. But... We've done a horrible thing and buried it in an extremely hard-to-find place. Sorry about that - totally my bad.
In the future, we'll get it fixed so that you can run this from right inside your PRO web app (which, let's face it, is where/when most of us actually need it). In the meantime, here's how to access it:
Step 1: Run a Keyword Difficulty Report
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Step 2: Use the "Run Full Report" Button
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Step 3: Go to the "Recent Reports" List
Step 4: Look for the "in progress" Message to Change to a Link
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Step 5: Get Ready for Awesome
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The individual tabs at the top will scroll you horizontally through the report, and you can export to Excel to do even more crazy cool custom stuff with the data.
I hope that, like me, you can save yourself endless hours of metrics collection for individual SERPs using this tool. For a deep dive on an individual set of results, it's the best thing I've found. And, if you have suggestions, let us know!
p.s. One thing we're already planning is to switch out Google Buzz Shares for Google +1 count :-)
It would be great if you could somehow add in your own site along with the top-ten results these reports are run against. Handy if the site you are trying to optimise doesn't sit in the top-ten.
Ha! That's a great request... because it's already in the pipeline!! I believe that feature will be available within the next few weeks.
I love this tool and that's the only feature I'm missing. Now I do the comparison manually, but hopefully it will be updated soon.
I <3 the new serps analysis reports. Super awesome.
Rand - you should upload a bunch of sample excel reports somewhere and link to them from the post, that way pro and non-pro members can quickly appreciate how awesome this tool is.
That's a really good idea Tom!
OK - here's a public Google Spreadsheet of the travel blog query from the post. Enjoy :-)
oh, how I wish everyone who produced reports used a big red arrow to show you where to click - it does make life simpler for thos of us who need big red arrows in our life - thankyou :)
Hey Rand,
Thanks so much for the blog post to point out the tool and of course the big red arrows to make it dead easy!
There are a few features that would be nice on the Recent Reports page -
The tool is awesome and already identified an omission that will make a big difference for one site!
Roger ROCKS!
Thanks, Sha - great suggestions! I'll look into adding the first two to the keyword analysis tool. The separation per product will probably best be served when we integrate this tool with campaigns, which is still a few months out.
Awesome!
Thanks Adam.
I see where you are going with waiting for campaign integration. It would be kinda handy to have it in the keyword tool as I tend to use it a lot to get a handle on things when assessing sites for prospective clients. Sometimes these clients may be a while before becoming an active job, so wouldnt want to use up a campaign spot.
Actually, just being able to sort and delete would get us halfway there in the keyword tool anyway, as there are often groups of queries that would follow each other alphabetically :-)
After running this report I'm left with the following conclusions:
Keyword in domain makes no difference
Keyword in anchor text makes no difference
Keyword in external links makes no difference
Social media shares make no difference
Page authority, doesn't make much difference
Number of links to page makes no difference.
Hey, it's your tool and this is what it's telling me.
The only things that seemed to make any diffence were links to the domain itself and domain authority, and even those didn't factor that much in the pages that were at the top of the search results.
In fact the pages that ranked at the top of the report didn't have the highest scores in any of the metrics used in this tool. Many of them had results of 0 for a lot of their scores.
This suggests to me that there are other factors involved in getting a top ranking which this tool doesn't cover.
And I'd really like to know what those are.
Drop me a PM and I'll be more than happy to help you out.
Great job, seomoz!!! I love this tool and its new features. Any chance that we see the option of PDF-export in the near future?
I sent in a request for PDF. Go to the report and click the feedback button on the left.
Killer. This is why I love (and pay for) SEOmoz. Brilliant and useful tools and info. Thanks guys!
Looking forward to using this tool. Should make a huge difference. Thank you Rand!
Rand, Really cool feature. When looking at the data, I notice that some of my numbers are better than that of people above. Do you guys have a reference that shows the importance of each category compared to one another and how much they factor into positioning?
Another thought:
Articles like this are great. I used to work at an agency that had an SEOmoz Pro account and many people there didn't take advantage of it cause they may were overwhelmed and not quite sure how to interpret the data. I think articles like this go a long way to showing the practical ways of using moz tools. I know they can do more than how I use them, this article is proof of that!
And it gives the community chances to share how they use the tool. SEO people are damn creative!
Austadpro - great point, that would be exremely helpful when trying to educate the client on these different metrics
Awesome. Huge time saver. Heck, seems like some of the recent trial balloon IPO's don't offer as much utility.
... yet another reason why SEOMoz Pro is the Bomb!! Thank you!
Just wanted to like this reply because you called something "the Bomb!!" in 2011
Nice! Looks like I'll finally be signing up for a Pro Account as this is an area that Raven lacks in.
yup, what they said.
>integrate our own target urls so we can see how ours compare with the top 10.
>allow integration into other tools (for easy multiple keyword use).
>provide a blow by blow interpretation of the metrics explaining why some metrics are more important than others in certain cases and vice-versa.
>pls stop promoting this so much :-) - I don't want my competitors to know about these tools!
>integrate your SEOMOZ-TASTIC extra special checkmarks into the csv data somehow - or explain why...
>keep on keepin on!
I like #3.
Oh this is really great. I did not know it existed until your blog post. Thank you! This is fantastic. My Moz account has paid for itself SOOO many times over. :)
Fantastic tool! THANK YOU!!! One thing though; I noticed for non geo-targeted terms that pull local results, (when I analyze "plastic surgery" for example) the reports are pulling Seattle results. This makes sense since you, and I assume the SEOmoz Master Computer, are located in Seattle. Would be wonderful if we could have an option to change the location setting so we can check terms like these in different geographical markets.
Good call! I'll put the team on that - we should be geo-agnostic like the rank collection data (and in the future, hopefully get a local results analyzer for maps/local results).
This is such a timesaver and iv'e been using it a lot. Really really great work SEOmoz team. My biggest request on it would be to allow you to enter a domain to compare against that may not be in the top 10 :)
You guys definitely need to do this one! Most of the time we want to rank higher aren't listed in the top ten so we have to do comparison manually!!
This is a fantastic offering from SEOmoz!
I have been pulling numerous reports recently.
My only concern is the way serp rankings change based on state not country and also user personalization.
But overall 100% positive =) Cant wait for more great tools from SEOmoz =)
Noticed there seems to be a small issue on the full report page which results in incorrect numbers for search volume at the top of the page. It seems the data populating that section is a little mixed up.
When looking at the keyword Recent Reports list, the broad and exact match numbers for both local and global are visible, but when you click to the Full Report, all 4 columns are populated with the Broad Match figures.
Thanks for pointing this out! We're working on a fix.
:)
Looking through a report that I just ran, it looks like subdomains are being lumped in with their root domains? I'm looking at a Blogspot blog that's reporting 711,142,833 external links (they've only got 958 per Y!SE), plus some other fairly crazy numbers that are completely wrong for the domain. Any chance a fix is in the works?
Screenshot here: https://farm7.static.flickr.com/6149/5955307675_a968211a30_b.jpg
Hi Rand et al
Tools sound great, but when looking at your example spreadsheet why is
https://www.elliott.org/blog/11-travel-blogs-you-should-bookmark-in-2011/
ranked number 1 for travel blog because its metrics in the report are lower than all of some of the sites listed below it? It it ranked number 1 and I know I am simplyfying this quite a bit because it has the phrase travel-blogs in its URL because that what it looks like to me. I know some will saw yes but its because one quality link from the likes of the BBC etc is worth a 1000 low quality links but how would you proove that - via open site explorer
At the risk of being thumb 'downed' I am gonna say this - i feel like I should be paying more for this. Also, thanks a ton for making SEO this easy *sarcasm* :)
Duuuudes, awesome tool! You guys are beginning to make all of my other SEO tools unnecessary;)
Awesome! Thanks for such a great tool!
WOW. I love it. I'm likeing it, +ing it tweeting it, and useing it. Thanks Rand.
Awesome tool, the social metrics on this alone make it a very valuable tool
This is freakin awesome, Rand. I've been looking forward to this tool, and the iterations, for months now. Great work engineers!
To follow on Tom's idea, maybe also a before the update and after the update comparison would be awesome. I'd also love to hear how people are using this tool for awesome!
Looking forward to using this tool. Should make a huge difference. Thank you Rand!Mauriciohttps://www.4corescomunicacao.com.brTwitter: @4cores
Seeing just a taste of what's behind the pro wall like this makes me really want to climb over to the other side....
Is this working for other tld extensions of google?
For example google.gr
Yes it is! You just need to select the tld when you first enter your keyword. The dropdown for selection is just below the textbox. Sorry that the dropdown list is not alphabetized. We'll fix this soon.
That's a very good tool.
I think just one thing could make it even better. A global number, just one number for every result, that could define every position respect the other competitors in relative numbers.
That would make help us a lot for seeing, by example, if we rank #2, how far is #1 and how far is #3.
Do you think that could be possible?
Thanks
Abel, that would indeed be the grail for a feature like this. Unfortunately that is a very tall order. In fact if we could score each site completely accurately, we would be able to programmatically replicate Google's rankings, which is a fairly tough thing to do. :)
The focus for this tool is really to help understand the areas of strength and weakness for each ranking site, and help uncover the reasons they rank well. It also provides a deeper understanding of where the difficulty of ranking for a term might lie.
I see great potential in using this tool and have a request. I would like to see a key/legend that reminds me what each of the data field is and how one would go about improving that ranking factor for the start site. Like others, I ran it on one a 'test' site which ranked #10. Would be nice to know out of all those factors, which are more influential and how we can improve them. this sort of results data integrated with the Campaign Manager and site specific suggestions that even the most novice SEO could follow would be great!
I like this tool, but I'm still at a loss on why a couple of sites are beating mine. My page has more check boxes in the different areas, but trying to tease out why those pages are higher than mine seems more art than science right now.
Only just got to this due to a manic week the last week and getting my wife out to events for her Chocolate Business.
Thanks for pointing all this out - you guys product such great tools that save so much time - I can guarantee that my cost in £GBP is far cheaper than the equivalent time cost of doing this stuff manually, and not half as well.
Just a big thumbs up, thanks for including Social Signals - only had to surmise things on this level before, now we have data, which is MUCH better. Thanks!
Did someone say "Chocolate"? :D
That's almost as yummy as SEO!
OMG ! This is seriously awesome! You guys are SEO wizards. Thankyou for this useful spell (as I call it!)
Thanks for your post. I'll try this
Nice work! Excellent tool and thanks for highlighting on how to use it!
Looks like a very good tool to analyze all your top competitors at once.
Great!! This is freakin awesome, Rand.
Really nice share. Thank you!
I was just searching for tool like this for a long time, earlier I was using all those metrics for calculation of competition opposition and what not! saved me my tons of time. Seriously awesome stuff Rand!
Rand,Thanks for the reference of this tool in my Q&A. It really is a nice tool hidden in the mix of all your tools.
Very good tool, but I would add another features:
That's pretty useful! Am off to try it and make a comparison with Market samurai's competition analysis feature.
Super cool idea!
I think you might have won me over again. Think im gonna have to rejoin pro.
So, SEOmoz thinks Facebook, Twitter AND Google+ has an impact on rankings? I didn't know G+ had impact, only Twitter and Facebook. Given to what I've understand is that G+ has impact only on personal rankings (when you're logged in and friends has been G+:ing sites).
I understand if your including of G+ is only to be secure about the future :-) I would do the same if I were you even though I don't think G+ has a general impact today.
I did not see a mention of Google+. I did see Google Buzz, which I believe is different than the +1. I could be incorrect.
You're correct. We currently show Google Buzz, but plan to replace it with Google+ in the future.
I somehow missed this article when it was publised. Very enjoyable read.
I do have one question. It seems too obvious to not have been asked already so I am braced to be embarrassed for missing something obvious.
The purpose of the SERPs analyis tool is to help SEOs answer the question "Why do these sites rank here?". After examining the Google spreadsheet for "travel blog" I actually have that exact question for the #1 ranked site.
The #2 site clearly beats the #1 ranked site in every metric across the board. So why does the #1 rank site appear at the top of SERPs?
This question led me to examine the content. I noticed the tool doesn't offer any metrics on the content itself. H1 tags, LDA and other metrics could possibly improve the usefulness of the tool. I noticed the #1 ranked page has a LDA of 56% whereas the #2 is 37%. I am mentioning this mainly because it is a measurement where the #1 ranked site beats the #2.
So in summary my question is, what is this tool missing to better explain the #1 vs #2 ranking in this instance?
Nice one team...
I look forward to full integration with the web app and perhaps better navigation? Having to run a report before being given the option to run the full report is a tad lacking.
:)
Agreed. I agree that the campaign interface will be better, but we'll see if we can make this easier in the current interface as well.
Just a drive-by screenshot question.... Does that spreadsheet just give a Yes or No on the social media tab? A lot of the other columns are numeric, couldn't it list an aggregate sum of tweets, shares, and +1's or something for easy comparison across the top results?
I think I see where the confusion is... The screenshot has an arrow pointing to the social tab, but it is not selected so the Yes/No data below it as actually not the social data. If you run a report and look at the actual social data, it includes numeric counts for each metric.
Thanks, that makes so much sense. That means there's even more data here than I initially realized!
Great post- thanks for the exmaples!
Great stuff, I really like the social media data. I'm sure that you'll expand this information over the next year.
Sooooo good. Thanks for the insight Rand, I will be using this tool more often!
Wow, this is excellent. What an amazing way to compare links, social media, and on-page optimization.
Great Additon! Rand It would also be helpful if the Rank Tracker Tool would display the ranking of the 3 search engines all on the same line. Just wonding if this is something that you are considering or will consider.
Thanks for the suggestion! We are planning to update the current Rank Tracker tool to be much more like the rankings reports we have for campaigns. Showing rankings for multiple engines in one row would make more sense in that context. However, we do know that customers like the flexibility to track across many different engines, and not necessarily consistently across keywords. This might make standard columns more of a challenge.
In any case, we will certainly consider this as we make plans for the update for the features. Unfortunately I don't have a timeline for it just yet.
Looking forward to it. Love that you guys continue to improve your tools.
Sweet report.
What an awesome tool, I just used it this morning before I read your post but I totally missed the social media data tab. You guys rock. It really does save a lot of time to have all this info in one report. Thanks!
Wish I still had access to my old pro account. Unfortunately, my new position doesn't warrant the monthly cost. It's tools like this + OSE that make me really miss it though!
I haven't tried it either but I like what I saw in those examples.
Trying this new tool is like eating ice cream on a really hot day: Brain Freeze! It is spinning with all the ideas I'm getting on how to use it. Thanks!
Love it!
Wondering if someone could clarify what exactly defines a FB "share" as the type that is indicated in this report?
Is it any sort of mention of the URL within FB? Does a button have to be involved or can it be a cut and paste of a URL? And does it have to be a specific button to count as a share (like, send, recommend, etc)?
Thanks!
Has anyone said you look like Rand?
There is a differnce between a like and share. A share comes out on your FB wall and is shared on all the feeds of your friends. I think the like feature only comes out on your wall. I think they get this info from FB API.
Thanks so much for chiming in! So a share gets pushed out to the feeds of friends? What are all the ways a "share" happens?
I guess I am somewhat confused about this, because admittedly I don't use Facebook personally (other than to set up business pages for clients) but am not involved with the day-to-day activity.
But secondly, because I know earlier this year, FB depreciated the "share" button, and the like button "took over its functionality" (according to the FB developers website).
So I'm still just wondering, what actions have to happen that qualify something as a share? Pushing a certain FB button located on the website its self? Linking to a URL within FB? Both?
Thanks, if anyone can help further clarify this!
PS - No, no one has said that - I think its just the photo my wife took - she suggested we use the wall in our newly painted dining room. :-)
The Facebook Open Graph is how we retrieve the data, and it's basically showing "shares" as any external URL that's been pushed to your wall (and thus can be seen by your friends in either "top news" or "most recent").
Perfect, thanks!!
Mine with this tool was love at first sight.
Luckily, as I use a lot the keyword difficulty tool (will it be integrated into the app soon?), I discovered the ranking analysis one almost the same day it was launched. Yes, it is a time saver and it is so useful that it is surely one of the reason I prefer the SEOmoz tools among all the others.
It's probably a few months out (possibly as late as Q1 2012) for the integration with the web app, but definitely on the roadmap. We're trying to spec out whether we can auto-run this for all of the keywords you care about/track in the app and re-run so the reports are instantaneously accessible. We also have tons of other projects on deck for the app and other tools, and engineering/product teams are hard to scale.
But, excuses aside, yes. That is something we're working on.
This tool is one of the best on the market, especially since the upgraded social media features. I'm really impressed and it will feed my data addiction for SEO.
hah! really nice tool rand.
i will try to do that now, and analyse the serp.
btw, mozzers are the best.
Thanks Rand - great tool. Looking forward to using it for a couple of clients.
This is looking incredibly useful.
I have to ask though, given the original question (Why do these sites rank here?), and given the data returned for the example query 'travel blog'...why does the number one spot (elliott dot org) rank there?
When I looked across the data, what stood out to me was the combination of good link and social metrics (and decent on-page/domain metrics) in such a short period of time (it hasn't been around long compared to the others, though many of them have been updated more recently). I'm also guessing there's some very good, relevant content from a usefulness/quality perspective that's helping out.
Many thanks for the reply Rand. Was just surprised to see the numbers on that listing significantly down on the competition, right accross the board, including link and social metrics.
Hi Rank, i believe we should have a webinar or a blog post explaing about how to make the best use of the most important metrics or all of the metrics listed in the report. The above sheet has loads of metrics it can be tought sometimes to look all of them therefore we should be focusing on what are best metrics we should be focuing on when anaylysing the website from the above spread sheet.
Hi, I mean Rand instead of Rank...
I see there are Tweets & FB Shares, but what about FB likes? I like that you're replacing the Buzz with Google +1
Good to know xD ... and +1 for Google Buzz Shares on Google +1 count :D (looking forward to it)
Nice information. Keep on writing bro.. thanks..
Is it posible to pull result 1 to 20 (or 50) maybe? It would give more insight in how to get to the first page on the more challenging keywords without puting in the numbers by hand!
And another possible opportunity for improvement is (again) explaining what the metrics mean, or a link to the definition used in this case.
this tool rocks!
Thanks! We are working on adding the ability to add a URL of your choice to compare against the top 10, which is not the same, but hopefully should help.
As for definitions as to what the metrics mean, this is also a great idea, and I will look into getting this in there soon too.
It would be great if it would show data for top 20 rankings, so that one could find the potential ranking keywords and use the metrics data to push them in top 10.
Great tool nonetheless.. Thanks
Is it possible that you will incorporate my domains PA and GA into the keyword difficulty score to help me see where I might rank?
great tips here... I heard that secret before but never put my mind into it... Thanks for sharing...
Nothing more to say than absolutely brilliant!
Thanks Rand Great update . I am looking forward for this great update. Really Its more usefull for SEO.
Thank you and will wait for one more...
I haven't tried this, and at the moment, I don't have a PRO account :(
However, I've used the OSE tool, billion times, and I really really really really love that tool.
All sites I have optimized using that tool, IS ranking at the moment.
SEOmoz, you kick ass.
Awesome tool! Thanks for that - first report in progress :)
Excellent report. Really looking forward to using this. SEOmoz continues to push us and help us become better for our clients. So excited about the social portion of this report. We are diving head first into adding this into our services.
I will continue to be critical so that you may continue to make SEOMoz stellar. Your first sentence points out my #1 annoyance with SEOMoz: your UX. It's the suckiest part. Your content is unbelievably amazing, the tools, the Pro community, interactions, features, and your culture is ALL stellar. But the UX... sigh. Right now my number one issue is your Search function. About 2/3rds of the time I can't find what I'm looking for.
Considering that I have NEVER been unable to find what I am looking for by using the SEOmoz search function, I would think the issues you are experiencing are likely to be user specific.
Shamenz: I should have been more specifc. The search function I'm refering to is in the Q&A section, not the global one.
ah! that explains a lot!
I see the problem now :)
Totally hear you. It's a very, very hard problem and one that will take time to fix, but we know it's bad, and we are putting our full effort behind fixing this. I'll try to share more on the blog as we make progress in concepts, wireframes, UI, etc.
Thanks for your transparency - thumbs up!
I really appreciate the feedback as well! As Rand said, we have a big effort underway to rethink and improve the information architecture and UX of our site. In that vein, if you have specific areas of frustration and would like to share, I'd love to hear more about what you are looking for, and what you are having trouble finding. Is it ok if I contact you directly?
Adam: sure you can contact me directly.
On the search function for Q&A, if you dig deeper, it gets even more interesting. The global search (powered by Google) actually helps me find the specific question I am looking for better than the Q&A specific search function. eg. try searching for "duplicate content" in Q&A. The results aren't what you'd expect. But the global search function has no filters so sometimes I have to do several creative searches before I find what I'm looking for.
Thanks! I see what you're saying. I'll pass this feedback along so we can look into improving it those results.
If you have feedback on other speicific areas of UX, let me know and I'll get in touch!
Shoot me an email. I do have a few that have come up in the past. When they come up again, I'll know who to email.
Very interesting tool thx for the post as i was not aware of it. Hope it will help us in the ongoing challenge of outranking keyword domains ...
Excellent reporting tool. Thanks, Rand.
I am in the process of trying it out for the first time, and after 20 minutes
the "New Report in Progress" status has not yet turned into a link. Approximately, how
long does it take to return Full Report data?
Note to self: about 23 minutes - in this case :-)
I've been looking at the new social signals today for a very competitive sector which I know is being heavily spammed. I must say am really disappointed with this update after reading the blog post.
It contains very basic social signal information that I can get on dozens of other sites for free. Tweets, FB shares and Buzz shares. Really? We all know where the real value is social metrics, seriously you guys need to spend some serious time developing some new tools. We have developed our own in house social media saturation tool which is more advanced.
It would be great if you shared it with the community.
A lot of this data is "free" cost wise, but maybe not so much time wise. If there's a tool that can give me in a few minutes the same information I could look up myself for free a hundred hours, would that not be worth the value of that time?
True, especially if it's affordable, lol. If it's expensive you just make it free so we could all use it, lol, jk.