After redesigning the content pages, as well as adding a Feedback form (please tell us how can we improve Rankpanel or how much you like the changes!) we're finally setting our sight on the app. Today we're releasing new tables, a new help section, and laying the groundwork for something very special.

Error Background

First, though, let me provide a little background on why we had these problems in the beginning of this week. Last week we changed our data holding period to 3 years in order to provide you with more historic data as we grow older. Because we're using quite new technologies that are not yet stable and tested in all instances, some things happened that forced us to scrap a lot of last week's data :( Rest assured, everything has been fixed by now and we've learned a lot from that.

Updates

Today we're rolling out a large update. You should find yourself delighted from many things that will make Rankpanel easier and faster to use.

One thing we are putting a lot of thought into is to display information in the most accessible way. After reworking the graphs we have completely overhauled the tables. Our beautiful new tables have a higher contrast making them more readable. We're also using colors to emphasize on which row you focus and better graphics. The new tables should make the site much more coherent as well. What do you think?

Another thing that bugged us was the calendar. Selecting dates was not as easy as it should have been. We have fixed that now :)

To be finished with the content pages we've also redone the whole help section. Have a look at our new help section. All your questions should be answered by our Sun-Tsu-Help master. And in case any questions remain, please contact us via our new contact form.

Of course we've also used the time to fix many things in the machine room.

One more thing :) If everything works out, you should be able to export data from Rankpanel next week. How about that?

You know what would be great? If you'd have the SEOscore available to check any website you like while you're surfing! And although a native Rankpanel toolbar is a bit off, you can easily get all the Rankpanel gold in your browser using another great tool: SEOquake. Adding a button for SEOscore, number of keywords and number of rankings is easy and will take you less than a minute! Let me show you how.

SEOquake

In case you're not familiar with SEOquake, it is the most popular SEO Browser toolbar. It is free and you can downloada it directly on their site. It supports all major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari) except Internet Explorer.

Adding the Rankpanel buttons

Although SEOquake comes already equipped with many useful parameters, Rankpanel is not included (yet). But fortunately they make it quite easy to add parameter-values.

Defining parameters in SEOquake can be done in "SEOquake Preferences > New": Just enter four different values, Name, Title, URL_R, REGEXP.

Fortunately you don't even have to know what these values stand for, because I'll hook you up with all the honey you need below (but if you're reaaaaaally interested you can look them up).

Adding the SEOscore

[Name]=Rankpanel SEOscore US[Title]=US SEOscore[URL_R]=http://www.rankpanel.com/seoscorehistory?d={clean_domain|encode}&dc=us[REGEXP]=<tbody>.*?<td class=".*?score_0"><span>(.*?)</span>

Adding the number of rankings

[Name]=Rankpanel Rankings US[Title]=Rankings[URL_R]=http://www.rankpanel.com/organickeywords?d={clean_domain|encode}&dc=us[REGEXP]=<dd>(.*?)<a

Adding the number of keywords

[Name]=Rankpanel Keywords US[Title]=US Keywords[URL_R]=http://www.rankpanel.com/organicpagedistribution?d={clean_domain|encode}&dc=us[REGEXP]=.*keys_0"><span>(.*?)</span></td><td class=" keys_percent_0 organicpagedistribution_keys_percent_0"><span>-</span>

PPCscore

[Name]=PPCscore US[Title]=US PPCscore[URL_R]=http://www.rankpanel.com/ppcscorehistory?d={clean_domain|encode}&dc=us[REGEXP]=<tbody>.*?<td class=".*?score_0"><span>(.*?)</span>

Number of paid rankings

[Name]=Rankpanel Paid Rankings US[Title]=US Paid Rankings[URL_R]=http://www.rankpanel.com/paidkeywords?d={clean_domain|encode}&dc=us[REGEXP]=<dd>(.*?)</dd>

Adding the parameters for another country

If you'd like to add the SEOscore or any other parameter for another country, just exchange the end of the [URL_R] string:

• US: &dc=us
• UK: &dc=en
• FR: &dc=fr
• DE: &dc=de
• ES: &dc=es
• IT: &dc=it

After you've done adding the Rankpanel buttons, you just have make sure to set a tick on the "Toolbar" column for all of them. Now you can use the buttons in the toolbar. And if you'd like to see the details of any site in Rankpanel simply click on the Rankpanel button after the value is loaded and it will take you directly to the correct Rankpanel screen. Pure magic! Keep in mind, though, that in order to enjoy this luxury you've got to be logged into Rankpanel. Enjoy :)

A big part of SEO is picking the right enemies to fight. But with millions of results per keyword finding comparable competitors is no easy task. There are tools that suggest competitors automatically, however we found that they mostly list amazon and wikipedia, simply because they rank for so many keywords. Our goal with Rankpanel is to make SEO understandable and effective for everybody. This is why in this post I will lay out a structured and effective process of finding the relevant competition.

Find your focus

Competition always has context and in SEO the rankings are the context (Tweet This). So the first thing is identifying the keyword focus. In order to determine the relevant competition a selection of 20 keywords is usually a good place to start.

Example

Let's look at an example: Pegasuslighting.com is a niche online shop with a very fine name that focuses on lighting.

Automatic suggestions

I have tested the suggestions of 2 well-known tools, in order to see what they come up with for the top 5 competitors:

• Tool 1
  • amazon.com
  • lightinguniverse.com
  • lampsplus.com
  • homedepot.com
  • lightingdirect.com
• Tool 2
  • lightinguniverse.com
  • lampsplus.com
  • lightingdirect.com
  • ylighting.com
  • buylighting.com

But are these real competitors of the shop we're looking at? A quick SEOscore comparison reveals that these three domains have a SEOscore at least 30 times higher! So going head to head with these players does not make much sense for our niche shop for now.

Filtering potential SEO competitors

This means we're back at square one... Let's ditch the easy solution and pause for a minute to think. How do our main competitors look like?

• They're in the same industry, which is why they focus on the same keywords
• Their rank is comparable or better
• Their size in terms of products, which translates into number of ranking keywords, or simply SEOscore, is comparable

Knowing this, the process of determining the relevant competition is then straightforward:

1. Check the Organic SERP for the focus keywords to identify potential competitors
   • For each keyword look at all domains that rank on your page and higher than you do
2. Filter the potential competitors by relevance:
   • Count how often they rank for our focus keywords
   • Count how often they rank above us
3. Make sure potential competitors are comparable:
   • Comparable # of rankings
   • Comparable SEOscore

Determining your real competitors

Put all your data in an Excel spreadsheet and determine your relevant SEO competitors (for this example I've only used 10 keywords). Then calculate the competitor score by taking into account the difference between your domain and both, the potential competitors and their relevance. In a last step rank the competitors by decreasing score. Et viola you have a list of your top and relevant competitors:

• brodwax.com
• budgetlighting.com
• 1stoplighting.com
• jascoproducts.com
• destinationlighting.com

Now that you have found your major competitors it is also not that hard to figure out how to overtake them. You should start with SEO research. In this article I come up with actionable insights on how you can overtake your competition. So it's definitely worth a read :)

What you think of the methodology I propose? Have you used something similar to come up with relevant competitors?

Feature image source: Flickr

Google just presented splendid results for Q2 2012. Only rarely does a company of that size and profitability show such growth rates. For us as online marketing professionals, obviously, Google is not just any company but to an extent a company that determines our jobs. Certain speculation erupted online about how the recent algorithmic updates helped increase revenue by promoting ads and rendering organic results less relevant. I would like to address these concerns in this post and provide supporting evidence.

The quarterly numbers (Q2 2012)

Google's annual and quarterly reports reveal not only numbers but also help analyze its long-term strategy and trends. This quarterly report ads small pieces to the puzzle: Advertising in search is just not sexy enough anymore because revenue growth rates are declining and are expected to decline over time. The next hot areas are social, enterprise, commerce, and local (see p.2 of earnings slides)

The ads on google.com

Google states in the quarterly report, that the success of its advertising business depends among other things on:

• The relevance, objectivity, and quality of our search results and the relevance and quality of ads displayed with each search results page.
• The number and prominence of ads displayed on our websites But did advertising really increase overall?

Rankpanel's keyword coverage is very well suited to answer this question in one click: When comparing the number of keywords with ads for 3rd week of July 2011 with the same week in 2012 it is quite clear that ads shown decreased significantly! (I also checked other weeks in the same quarter and found comparable results.)

What we see, though, is a significant change in ad distribution on the SERP. Google moved clearly away from showing only ads on the right side and towards showing ads above the organic results. The change is dramatic: In 2012 Google shows 13 times more SERPs with exclusively top ads, while SERPs with both only ads to the right and both right and top ads decreased. At the same time SERPs showing no ads at all doubled!

This shift can explain the 42% increase in paid clicks, as top ads have a significantly higher CTR.

It does also point towards the conclusion that not lower quality search results but different ad placement drove Google's revenue.

Other factors driving revenue

Having said that, the Rankpanel keyword set is composed of 500k keywords. Therefore, these results do not reflect on the long tail.

Another known factor is not represented in the numbers: Google has increased the number of ways to monetize the SERP via, e.g.

• Paid product listings
• Vertical affiliates, such as flights
• Monetization via Youtube videos

All these things have pushed organic results down below the fold, as shown in the now famous "hd monitor" example or local things.

Conclusion

1. The numbers and trends suggest that Google is overall leaving less money in the SERP. Tweet this
   Better monetization is achieved via
   • AdWords position shifting
   • New ways of monetization
2. I don't think that Google would cut in their own flesh by diminishing the quality of search results on purpose, given the increased amount of SERPs with no ads whatsoever. Tweet this

We have launched Rankpanel publicly 3 months ago. It's been a great ride so far. First of all I would like to thank all our brave users for helping and supporting us. You guys are great! We feel very fortunate that our product was received so well all over the world. Reacting to your feedback from surveys and user testing we started to change things and improve our site. You've noticed our beautiful new Homepage, About and Feature pages. Now it's time for the app.

Data visualization

Visualizing data is central to interpreting and communicating it effectively. Charts can help detect trends and understand how things fit together. They make it easier to recognize proportions and put things into perspective.

In Rankpanel it is easy to get lost in all those numbers and metrics we provide, especially for SEO beginners. This is why charts improve the user experience a lot and are a central element to all analytics applications, not just Rankpanel. Since our launch one of the things that bugged us (and you) the most were our charts. However, whenever we looked at other tools, we found that they did not communicate data better than us. I mean even Google Analytics started out with bad charts. This is why we set out on a trip to get the best data visualization into SEO (and had our fair share of fun and chart porn while inspecting many best practices).

New Charts

Today we have launched our new charts. Our goal was to convey data in the best possible way. This is why our charts need to be boring. However, boring does not mean that the charts will not be visually pleasing. (I hope you agree with us that the charts are much prettier now.) I think with the charts we've just released we have achieved the maximum of both, as our charts: 1. Effectively communicate information 2. Do not entertain or confuse 3. Display only necessary details 4. Are so pretty, you wanna lick them ;)

Improvements

If you look at our new SEOscore charts you will find it much more readable and bigger. Now that they're beautiful we're really proud to present them :)

We have also included an interactive legend that lets you conveniently focus on domains while making clear which line belongs to which domain. You can also quickly turn on/off other domains in the charts when performing comparisons.

Because the SEOscore is a an index, the colored area of a mountain chart helps to see its height. Detecting the difference between two SEOscore lines is also improved.

We have also reduced a lot of clutter and things that did not directly contribute to communicating information. For instance in the page distribution when comparing between different points in time only the shades change.

So we've put in a lot of work into our charts and will continue to improve them and add more interesting visualizations soon. What do you think about our new charts? Do you like them? Have we missed any data visualization best practices?

The candidates on the web

The contender: mittromney.com

The cup holder: barackobama.com

How do they compare?

1. barackobama.com has geekappeal
• site uses new web technologies
• site has clean frontend code, with Obama's campaign logo in ASCII (extra points)
• site is custom built, not as in the case of Romney built on Drupal
2. barackobama.com shows conversion optimization know-how
• e.g. additionally to the "Donate" call-to-action it also includes a more specific and potentially higher converting "Quick Donate $5" button, which is in sync with Obama's focus on small grassroots donations

Conclusion

1. A successful presidential candidacy has a lot in common with successful startups: Both require a great and balanced team as well as innovation. Tweet this
2. The president can use his years of head start and play them wisely in SEO to gain a competitive advantage. Tweet this
3. When it comes to the online channel Romney may be served best by copying Obama. Tweet this

First of all what are tracking tools?

What do the tracking tools offer

1. Performance improvements
• Lets you use define rule based strategies, e.g. ROI-based that automate bidding for one keyword or hundreds
• Real time bidding on keywords
• Balance the overall performance of all the keywords in each group to which a bidding strategy is applied
• Allow advertisers to track conversions over different channels, such as when running a campaign that consists of both display and search
2. Campaign management improvements
• Allows for campaign management over multiple channels and ad-serving platforms through one interface, making it easier and saving time

What does Rankpanel tell me about tracking tools?

Quick domain change guide

Before the migration:

After the migration:

1. Permanently redirect (301) all pages from the old domain to the new one
   • Lost link juice: 301s do not pass all the link juice
2. 301s are on a page level
   • crawling all pages takes time during which link juice is temporarily lost
3. Fetch the new domain as Googlebot to discover inconsistencies
4. Submit the sitemap to Google
   • Look for crawl errors on sites specified in the sitemap
   • Create a different Sitemap for each logical section of your site in order to discover badly indexed sections
5. Verify both domains with Google Webmaster Tools and fill out a "change of address" request
6. Update the most important backlinks and links to the most important pages (as measured by conversions, traffic, rankings)
   • You should regain at least some of the lost link juice
7. Monitor traffic and rankings
   • Look how rankings change and how it affects traffic
8. Monitor linkbuilding
   • Look for sudden changes in the growth rate of natural linkbuilding
9. Do not immediately close/sell/reuse the old domain for something else
   • Wait a couple of weeks and make sure that the old domain is out of the SERP and does not attract links anymore

Risks of domain migration

"It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it."

But how risky is it really?

• In 6/8 cases the SEOscore decreased after the domain migration
• In 2 cases it improved
• In 6/8 cases the SEOscore decreased leading up to the migration

Takeaways

1. Domain migration is a complex issue, so take your time and plan it thoroughly.
2. Most domains lose rankings before and after the migration, so don’t migrate during your most important business times (e.g. before Christmas for E-Commerce sites). On the other hand, you can use these week times of your competitors to your advantage.
3. Monitor your old and new sites long enough after the migration to detect mistakes.

1. Go directly to Google and search for your name. Look at the URL.
2. Go directly to DuckDuckGo and perform the same search. Look at the URL.

Normal Search - all you really need

Advanced search operators

Country and language

Google's advanced search tools

Other factors

Unclear Parameters