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How to Unlock Insights From Your Most Powerful Metric: Rank Position

Written by Mitul Gandhi | November 15, 2017

Without a shadow of a doubt, tracking and reporting on your ranking data is beyond necessary to your work.

But let's face it, it's actually the insight that you can extract from your ranking data that help you push your search visibility forward.

The thing is - keyword ranking tracking and reporting typically can only tell you so much.

For one, extracting information from them often means manually sifting through separate reports to connect the data and make any sense of it all. And then doing it again to compare your findings with competitor data.

Not to mention that, for the most part, you’re limited by the metrics you can review.

And so, albeit useful, a typical ranking report, fails to offer you the opportunity for gaining extensive insight into your search visibility.

Recommended Reading: SEO Ranking Reports: Accounting For Search Visibility Changes

Here, let me show you.

Why Ranking Reports Are So Insufficient for Modern SEOs

You know, in the past, monitoring SEO progress was so easy. You tracked rankings for a series of keywords, easily matching their performance to sales or other conversions.

Today, however, SEOs have to work without the query data. And this means no context for each transaction.

(Having said that, we’ve found a way to reverse “not provided.” Discover how.)

We deal with new search behavior too. Voice search is a great example.

(image source)

Finally, the search landscape has become incredibly competitive, forcing organizations to seek new insights to help gain a market advantage. And needless to say, overcoming those and many other obstacles requires deep insights and the ability to process them in real-time.

Now, let’s compare that with ranking reports, SEOs typically work with:

They are typically set up for you. Sure, ranking reports offer a plethora of information. But often, you have no ability to specify what data you’d like to see. At least not beyond a handful of rudimentary options like specifying the date range, switching between various devices or specifying a location.

Sure, you can always manually export the data, and then analyze it offline and compare with additional metrics from other sources. But I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s quite a tiresome task. And one that often leaves you at wits end, convinced that you’d missed some important insights anyway.

Ranking reports often give access only to limited metrics. There might be plenty of insight there, but for the most part you can only analyze the data deep enough.

You can work with a limited number of competitors too. Again, different tools offer various competitor tiers. But the fact remains, you can only compare so many competitors and are restricted in the amount of data you can use.

And needless to say, all that greatly limits the type of insights you could gain from your rankings.

Enter, Rank Intelligence

You know:

Our goal at seoClarity is clear – to give you access to ALL data and insights you need to win in search.

Simple.

(And let me emphasize the word “all.”)

Because you see, we believe that the secret to staying competitive in search is using the right, most relevant data exactly when you need it.

Rank Intelligence is another way we help you achieve that.

Rank Intelligence is the industry’s ONLY real-time SERP intelligence tool. It allows you to explore your managed keyword data in real-time, and access incredibly in-depth insights right when you need them.

What’s more, it allows you to analyze unlimited keywords and compare unlimited competitors to find answers to any questions you have about your visibility, and uncover insights otherwise buried deep in static reports.

Incredible, right?

So let me show you specifically how you could use the Rank Intelligence to boost your search visibility.

#1. Analyze true rank against ANY other domain in Google in real-time

You know, you can look at rankings in two ways.

Analyze your keywords relative positions in the organic search. Or check them in relation to other universal rank types -images, answer box, local listings, news, and video. And needless to say, the difference between the two is staggering.

For one, the true rank allows you to gain a much better insight into the type of content you’re competing against in SERPs. Now, this becomes even more important when you compare your rankings with the competition.

Here, let me show you. This is a true rank comparison between two domains:

The web rank comparison:

Although the difference might seem minimal, take into consideration that each of those domains ranks for thousands of keywords. And so, even a small shift in rankings equals a significant gain (or loss) of visibility and traffic which affects revenue.

Rank Intelligence allows you to assess your true rank on-the-fly, and compare that instantly with any other domain ranking in Google.

(Similarly, you could conduct this comparison with the pre-selected competitors as well.)

#2. Monitor changes to specific universal ranking types

Google SERP has definitely evolved based the 10 blue links. 

Google now displays ads, answer box results, news, local listings, images, shopping results, videos and many other ranking types that match a search query.

And needless to say, each of them affects your search visibility in a different way.

For example, local listings often steal clicks from organic listings. And SEOs already started considering the Answer Box (aka featured snippets) as “rank 0” in SERPs. (That's even when it doesn't appear at the top of organic listings.)

Rank Intelligence gives you instant access to ranking data for keywords triggering universal rank types. Compare and analyze your and your competitor’s efforts to rank for the Answer Box, local results or other rank types in real-time. 

#3. Check how many of your keywords trigger the answer box

You can also access more specific insights. For example, assess your visibility in Google's answer box. What’s more, you can then compare your performance against the competition to discover more opportunities to position more keywords in the answer box.

Here, let me show you how it works. Take a look at the graph below. It shows the difference in the number of keywords triggering the answer box for two domains.

And you can clearly see how one of them is gaining visibility, while the other is losing it.

Now, imagine the opportunities such insight would offer you, if you were the latter….

#4. Compare your rankings in specific competitor sets

Rank Intelligence doesn’t restrict the number of competitors you can compare with. And that gives you an incredible opportunity to compare your performance not against the standard competitor set but with specific domains that target only the selected keywords as your site.

For example, this domain competes with different organizations, depending on a product category.

Collectibles category:

And jewelry category:

Such in-depth insight allows you to compare your search visibility against real competitors, rather than a standardized and limited set.

#5. Easily compare page-level performance

This is probably obvious, but sometimes harder to do on the fly in a typical ranking report. With Rank Intelligence, you can filter by any comparable category, sub-category, or detail page in your site heirarchy and compare performance in 1, 10, or even top 100 positions. Here are a few examples:

  • For a travel site, compare how your hotel pages are doing compared to your flights pages.
  • For eCommerce, compare different product verticals either at the category page level or even down to the product page level.

This provides insights for any changes you made at a page-level, or even how the competitive landscape challenge may effect rankings of those pages within different categories.

It helps to prioritize your projects based on where your biggest or top performance opportunities are.

#6. Evaluate your schema implementation

I’m sure you already know that incorporating schema markup, particularly reviews or price, helps your search listings to stand out in SERPs, and attract a higher CTR. But are you certain that the markup is showing for all relevant keywords in SERPs? 

With Rank Intelligence, you can quickly assess your schema performance, and identify pages that fail to trigger price or star ratings in SERPs.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

Want to know more?

Check out the full overview of Rank Intelligence or schedule a time to see it in action here