Custom Reporting Suite

While creating a framework to help organizations integrate unpaid search acquisition into their development and marketing processes, we realized that they needed actionable metrics to measure the impact of their efforts and prioritize changes, and a recommendations roadmap for ongoing improvement.

An overwhelming amount of data is available from server logs, search engine tools, and analytics. We wanted to turn those numbers into a useful blueprint for real audience engagement and business value.

To that end, we’re hard at work on a search visibility reporting suite, customized for your specific needs and environment. We have a solid foundation that we’re excited about and keep adding features as quickly as our developers can code them!  Access right now is (very briefly!) by way of a private alpha so that we can make sure the foundation has everything organizations need for customization before we make it more widely available. If you’re interested in checking it out, request access to the alpha.

Key to the reporting is focus on categories, rather than individual keywords. We provide data about things like traffic and click-through rate from search results for topics, trended over time. We also analyze server logs for insight on how search engines crawl your site, which can alert you to issues that may be preventing your site from being fully indexed.

Below are a few samples of what’s available.

Google Search Trends

As we gather data over time from Google webmaster tools, we can organize and chart it. The sample below shows all the data for branded queries over time.

We provide similar trends for data such as Google-reported crawl errors, average page speed, and Google-reported on page issues.

Server Log Analysis: Search Engine Crawling Behavior

We parse your server logs and provide details about what pages and folders search engines are crawling, what types of issues the bots are encountering, a list of canonicalization issues, and more. We provide a summary report with the data, to alert you to key issues and insights. Below are just a few examples of how this data is useful.

Pages That Return 302 Redirects

Search engines interpret 301 redirects as permanent, and transfer accumulated value to the target page. However, search engines interpret 302 redirects as temporary, and value does not transfer. Our reporting alerts you to 302 redirects that you intended as 301s so that moved and consolidated content can be properly indexed and ranked. This report has other uses as well. For instance, often, pages behind a login 302 to the login page. By identifying these pages, you can block them with robots.txt and improve crawl efficiency.

Parameters and Canonicalization

Canonical issues can hurt both crawl efficiency and ranking because the same page can be accessed through a variety of URLs. Our reports alert you to a number of canonicalization issues, such as duplication due to URL capitalization and default pages. Our parameter report lists all parameters that search engines found, and the number of URLs that contained those parameters. You may think that an optional parameter that isn’t used anymore isn’t an issue, and maybe it’s not, but if you find that search engines are spending half of their crawling time on that parameter, then it’s causing significant indexing issues. Insight like this helps you prioritize where to invest your technical resources.

Changes in Search Engine Crawling Behavior Over Time

As you use this data to improve your site infrastructure, we can help you monitor the impact to search engine crawling. In addition, trended data can be useful to identify spikes in particular issues. Has crawling suddenly slowed down? Are search engines receiving significantly more 302s than usual? This type of information can alert you to problems right away, so you can fix them before they impact search visibility.

Historical Google Webmaster Tools Data Storage

The data available through Google Webmaster Tools is great, but it’s even more useful when you can track trends over time. We can store the data for you so you can access historical details at any time. As you can imagine, there’s lots that can be done with this data, but for now, let’s start with storing it.

Request an invitation to the private alpha now. Price varies based on the size and number of sites.