The search landscape changes at an unbelievable pace. New strategies emerge; some become old and outdated. So many changes have happened since our innovations post this past May. Rapidly advancing technology introduces more opportunities to reach customers in the SERPs nearly every day.
As a result, organizations continuously seek out an SEO platform that promises not only to stay on top of it all but one that will also deliver on their unique needs.
One of the main principles at seoClarity is that we base our entire product road map priorities on our client’s feedback.
Many ideas for features or enhancements we introduce come directly from seoClarity's customers. Whenever two clients request something, it gets prioritized and we build it. We truly listen to our customers' needs and understand their goals; therefore, we deliver upgrades to the platform on two-week development cycles.
With the year drawing to a close and as we look back at the hundreds of releases, allow me to recap some of the biggest feature launches and enhancements we introduced for our clients in 2018.
1. Content Fusion: A Truly Revolutionary, AI-Powered, Content Editor for Content Teams
If I were to describe Content Fusion in just one sentence, I’d call it: The entire SEO content marketing workflow in one place.
Content is beyond critical for organic search success. It’s near impossible to rank for specific keywords without content optimized for them, after all. Similarly, I can’t imagine boosting engagement signals without words that deliver the information a person seeks.
One negative outcome of the above, however, is that creating content has become increasingly challenging. To deliver relevant and engaging content, writers must understand more than just the page’s topic. They need to know the person’s intent behind the search, what information they are looking for, and much more.
That’s why we built Content Fusion, an AI-powered content editor for modern content marketing teams.
With it, our clients:
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Understand the intent behind the keyword,
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Identify what semantic keywords the top-ranking pages have included in their content,
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See how other companies have approached the topic already, and
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Write their content and evaluate it for topical relevance.
What’s particularly important is that they perform all of the above in real-time.
Dashboard view within Content Fusion showing search visibility, keyword intent, and search volume trend.
Must-use terms that top-ranking pages have used in their content, as identified by Content Fusion.
2. One Single Source of Truth for all Organic Search & Site Analytics
seoClarity has always offered a way to integrate and analyze organic search traffic, conversion and revenue data into the platform. I must admit, however, that as the available data has expanded, our clients began asking for more.
That's why, this year, we’ve upgraded it to move all the data that makes sense for SEO collected from Google Analytics for each client to the platform. That's all historical data back through January 2017.
We're not talking just the summary or domain level data, but all the detailed URL-level data. All available with interactive, on-the-fly analysis. We have thought of everything that is important to SEO management. Think of the possibilities - YOY comparisons, by any filter - Country, Device, Engine, Content Types, and more - all within a few clicks.
Now, our clients pull a tremendous amount of metrics, beyond just traffic and bounces. They can review every transaction and goal tracked in their Google Analytics.
Metrics viewed by content type within the Site Analytics feature.
3. 16 Months of Historical Google Search Console Data and More!
Search Analytics allows our customers to see beyond the term “not provided,” and uncover what keywords drive traffic to their sites and brings in 16 months of historical organic search data from Google Search Console.
We’ve been enhancing it continuously this year. For one, Search Analytics reveals close to 100% of the keyword visibility. You can even use it to analyze multiple Google Search Console profiles in one integrated view that you are then able to slice, dice and analyze to understand the anatomy of your organic search traffic.
4. Entire Backlinks Landscape for Any Domain
We also completely rebuilt from the (ground up, no less) our analysis of backlink profile for any domain, sub-domain or URL.
Our Backlinks database still integrates the backlink index data from Majestic, the world’s largest index and (we also offer integration with Ahrefs or Moz, if needed).
We’ve also enhanced it with new capabilities. Clients use this feature to:
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Analyze organic links,
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Conduct backlink analysis ad hoc, and for any competitor as well,
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Access information from a 7.8 trillion backlinks database, updated daily,
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Understand your backlinks based on various metrics, like the content type or search intent, and, most importantly,
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Analyze it all on the fly.
Backlinks Analysis feature in the seoClarity platform.
5. On-The-Fly, Dynamic Report Builder
There’s no question how critical reporting is for any SEO team. To meet our clients’ needs, we’ve upgraded the seoClarity reporting capabilities this year.
For one, we’ve launched a dynamic report builder and dynamic widgets. With those, clients have the power to create as many dashboard views as they'd like, and display data based on over 140 visualizations (or build their own) to measure and communicate their success.
The possibilities with this upgrade are endless. Literally select any metric combination, any comparison and add it to any dashboard you want.
This may seem like a simple addition - but ask other SEO platforms if you’re able to have this functionality without additional costs. And, let us know what you find out!
6. Enhanced Page Speed Insights
As improving the page speed becomes more and more critical to the search success, we’ve enhanced this capability for our clients. Now, you can review granular, URL-level reports on time-to-first-byte, rendering time, server response time and more to identify bottlenecks and improve the site’s speed.
Apart from that, we’ve also brought the actual Google Page Speed insights for every page you manage in the platform with the ability to run on-demand updates.
Page Speed Analysis view in the seoClarity platform.
7. New Specialized Rankings
Today, the search visibility extends far beyond the organic rankings. seoClarity has already offered the ability to track Google Maps and App Store Listings. We've listened to our clients and learned that many of them need to track other rankings at depth, too. So, this year, we’ve added the following:
Google Jobs
For a brand wanting to reach potential employees in Google Jobs, we now offer the ability to optimize their job listing there. Meanwhile, brands can review its performance to gain a better understanding of the queries people use to find their listings.
Job Pack Performance dashboard in seoClarity's Universal Rank Type view.
Video Rankings
seoClarity customers using video to promote their brand use the platform to understand their video’s visibility in the SERPs. In fact, they can see where the ranking carousel ranks on the page, and also, their video’s rank within the carousel.
But, wait - there’s more! With the video rankings capability, customers can review any YouTube channel’s performance in a SERP. In short, it will also help them gain the necessary insights to outdo the competition.
Video Rankings by Month in seoClarity's Universal Rank Type view.
Amazon Rank Tracking
Finally, our customers can now understand how their product listings rank on Amazon for their relevant keywords, analyze their performance, and know what action to take to improve them.
8. Powerful and Advanced Site Audit Capabilities
Personally, I have always believed that a site with fewer technical errors will always rank better - no matter how many links other web entities might have.
Most of our customers agree. And, for that reason, they find regular site audits critical to their SEO success.
To help them eliminate possible issues, we’ve enhanced our site audit capability – Clarity Audits – to offer more than even a specialized crawler tool has.
In fact, we’ve gone so far that, now, Clarity Audits has everything a technical SEO team maintaining a large site needs and more.
For one, our customers can now run customizable crawls at an incredible speed to crawl pages. Furthermore, our crawler learns over time to identify issues specific to the site.
Here’s what we’ve improved in the crawler this year, specifically:
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Faster speeds (crawls at 100 pages per second or more) and over 100 pre-built health checks.
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The ability to customize crawls.
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Increased support for schema validation, accessibility, and pagination validation.
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Validating canonical links with cross-checks of canonicalized pages.
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The ability to identify international SEO-related issues with dedicated hreflang audits.
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More than 20 new reports.
Clarity Audit Report that shows areas on your site that require attention, helping you prioritize tasks.
9. Spoofed Bot Activity in Bot Clarity
We also help our customers to target the spoofed bot activity problem. Day after day, fake crawlers access their sites to learn more about it, scrape its content or perform some malicious activity.
Bot Clarity identifies common of fake bots and IP addresses and tells our customers how much spoofed bot activity affects their site.
10. Interactive, On-The-Fly Analysis for Local Ranking Data
We launched Rank Intelligence - our interactive, enterprise-scale ranking analytics - last year, and our customers immediately fell in love with enhanced insights into their search visibility. The industry’s only real-time and fully interactive SERP intelligence tool allowed our customers to explore their managed keywords data in a far more depth. They can also compare performance with unlimited competitors and explore their strategies on the fly as well.
Many also asked for additional data, namely, geo-rankings. We upgraded to include the geographic location when analyzing ranking data.
A view of Rank Intelligence showing the comparison of two competitive brands and their local rank performance.
11. Visibility Share (Visual Rank Position)
While we're on the topic of rankings, seoClarity and our clients have noticed a slight challenge with reporting on rankings in the traditional way. Monitoring the position purely within the SERP no longer delivers the exact insight into the true visibility of a page.
When you compare the SERPs from only two years ago and today, you’ll notice a stark difference. In 2016, Google listed nothing else within the organic results but the actual search listings.
Today, it fills it with other elements – videos, product listings, images, local information, the featured snippet and so much more, right?
As a result, the first, second, or really any other position in the SERP no longer guarantee the impact on search traffic they used to. At the same time, many enterprise brands want to know what visibility they have in SERPs. Great news - we’ve found a solution to uncover it.
It’s called Visibility Share and in short, this capability measures the pixel height of every element on the SERP and reports how far down a page you appear, as well as your share of visibility.
If your team is ready to review this new way of measuring your rankings, contact us today. We’d love to give you a peek at how it works and the insights gained from this revolutionary way of measuring your ranking performance.
12. Upgraded Task Management
As anyone working on SEO can agree, the success of SEO efforts largely depends on workflows. Well, that, and their ability to enforce them, of course.
Having heard stories from our users about it, we’ve enhanced the platform’s task management capabilities within Actionable Insights. Now, our customers can assign out a task to any colleague (even those NOT in the platform) and comment on the task itself to manage the workflow more efficiently.
A view of the task management capability. Users can assign priority and status of a task even to non-platform users.
13. Keyword Research Revamp
In spite of the ongoing changes to the SEO landscape, keyword research remain at the center of many SEOs and content marketers' work. Not only do we have the largest, community-contributed keyword database (and the largest competitive intelligence dataset), but we've fixed the mess of keyword research plaguing SEO teams. Here’s what we’ve added this year:
- A new way of looking at keyword difficulty. We've based this on a digital SERP signature using machine-learning, combined with the Research Grid data, rather than a link profile.
- 2x to 10x more Mobile Ranking Visibility than the nearest competitor. All keywords within our database are rank- checked for both desktop and mobile every month, allowing users to gain a snapshot with rank updates LIVE throughout the month!
- Full global coverage of the GLOBAL search landscape. We released 25 additional countries this year to round out our global coverage of all countries including full desktop and mobile keyword database.
- Major upgrade to clean-up keyword research. Most keyword research tools have a mess of keyword data, touting a billion, maybe even a gazillion keywords in their databases. But the problem? You have to comb through the misspellings and duplicates and variations to get to the high-demand, valuable keywords. Our machine learning, artificial intelligence models have a clean-look at the research of keywords you are NOT going to believe. Keywords are guaranteed fresh and are rank-checked every month!
14. A Whole New Way to Look at Keyword Research: Topic Explorer
The first and only VISUAL keyword research tool on the market rounds out the major update to our keyword research capabilities. Topic Explorer breaks down the topics surrounding your seed keyword and displays the related terms from the largest, most effective keyword database in the market.
Topic Explorer uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and group keywords related to the key phrase and within the same search intent into different topic clusters to visually show you EXACTLY what you need to create to become the topic authority. Within a few clicks (think of the hours you are spending now to build this out), you can visually see the categories (and the keyword detail if you wish) along with the topics and sub-topics.
Looking Ahead to 2019
The above are only some of the biggest innovations and enhancements we added to seoClarity in 2018. Our plans for next year largely depend on you – our advocates, clients, and prospects.
If you specific challenge you haven't found technology to address, let us know. With short development sprints, chances are will be able to build it for you quickly in the year ahead!
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