Searchmetrics is a SEO and content marketing platform that also provides competitive insight and market analysis. The first time I met Searchmetrics was in summer 2012 when I was taking part in the State of Search Roadshow and met Marcus Tober, the founder and CTO.
I have always wanted to write a review of the platform especially as I have been reviewing quite a few over the past year.
In this review I look at 4 key areas of the Searchmetrics platform and what differentiates itself against some of the others in the market place.
- SEO Visibility
- Content Performance
- Competition Insight
- Visibility Guard
There are two key elements of Searchmetrics:
1) Project Area
2) Research database
The project area is where users can set up their own domains or those of their clients and monitor their Performance.
The research database contains over 250 billion pieces of information including organic search data, PPC, social and link data. This is where users can do a lot of research for other sites (that are not their clients).
This research data base is one of the USPs of Searchmetrics. This platform has the longest running record of Google data. Due to this is historical database, Searchmetrics can look at long term trends so can understand when changes are happening in search algorithms.
SEO Visibility
Visibility score is the industry standard to understanding search performance. It is not finite, it evolves based on changes in search volume. I know when I show clients how they appear on the Visibility graph, they are always impressed. But what exactly is it? SEO Visibility score is a representation of the strength of a website’s presence. It reflects how often the website will show up in the search results.
It combines many elements, Including Search Volume, ranking position, dynamic click through rate. The great the number of searches, the more visible the keyword is. The greater the position of a term, the more visible a keyword is.
Searchmetrics Visibility score relies on the historical research cloud which have over 250 billion pieces of information containing organic search data, PPC, social and link data. You can see the Visibility graph in the image below:
Content Performance
This is a rebranded area of the research cloud launched in July this year. There is also navigation on the left, so users can immediately jump to areas like Content Performance.
Landing pages are important to marketing managers/website owners. The content performance section of Searchmetrics helps you to find out what your most valuable landing pages are and what pages have the highest potential to perform well.
The chart above shows the highest performing pages. If a user clicks on one of the URLs, then they go directly to the content details. This is an interactive chart and users can see their most valuable pages.
The new feature of content performance is that users can also optimize in real time. It allows users to look at the content on the entire page and compare the content for the users’ pages against top competitions
Another key differentiator of Searchmetrics is that the platform groups the keywords into topics. The words in black below are the root keywords. These are the terms that Searchmetrics recommends optimizing for. It also means that the words in grey are optimized.
Competition Insight
This is also a new feature of the Searchmetrics platform. It allows users to compare a site on a page by page level. I had not seen this before. Competition insight compares your site to other competitors using the 8 most important ranking factors including search volume, traffic index, average position. It is a visual representation of how a page performs against these ranking factors. It is quite useful as it can help identify gaps in your online strategy and which ranking factors need to improve upon in order to capture more market share.
Visibility Guard
This is my favorite aspect of Searchmetrics. It proactively alerts you before a problem occurs, daily. Visibility Guard can also warn you if there are changes on your site that can cause an issue. For example when the developers do a release and suddenly they have no indexed the whole site or if 404 error pages on your top category ecommerce pages have appeared. This can really save you time as visibility guard analyses your top 1,000 important URLs per project. This does not have to be scheduled, it just has to be activated in the license. It is for those on Enterprise license 2014 and up.
Conclusion
These are just four key areas of the Searchmetrics platform. There are plenty of other features which help users save time and find out more about their websites to help them perform better. I could not cover all of these in this post. If you have used the platform and want to highlight key features you liked, I would love to hear from you, please get in touch.
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