Forcing an update (revisited)

[MarkWill]

Really quite disappointed with the response to this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/possible-to-force-the-seomoz-ranking-report-to-update

Three of us expressed an interest in this but the response was for (only) the original poster to create a ticket and the question was closed to any further discussion.

Might I request that SEOMoz folks read the thread? There is a general question and three of us have requested some feedback. It is very clear that more than one person is interested in the answer Just asking one of those individuals to open a ticket and get a response for himself doesn't seem very customer-centric (well, beyond that first customer).

I'd really appreciate an open and public discussion as to whether SEOMoz can support updates more than once a week and, if not now, whether it intends to in the future.

Thanks.

Mark

[MarkWill]

Thank you, Kate. Yes - that's exactly what I was after. A good, thorough explanation of the challenges involved and a response we can all use, not just the original poster of the thread. Thanks again - much appreciated.

Mark

[katemats]

Hey Mark!

Sorry you weren't satisfied with the answer - hopefully this large amount of detail will help [brace yourself]

First, a little history....

When we first built the web app, we had originally thought about emulating the tool Rank Tracker but in the campaign context.  Over 2 years (up to 2009) we had 85,000 keywords across all our customers, so we wanted to offer more functionality int he web app, so we allowed users to track up to 3 search engine for their keywords (this meant instead of just checking one rank, we generally check 3 ranks for every keyword).  We also increased the limit to many more keywords and allowed users to cut and past into the tool.

Since it was so easy to add keywords, and people watch Rand's video which made the suggestion to just "cut and paste all the words that drive traffic to your site", and pretty soon almost all our users were maxing out their keywords.

What we thought was a reasonable amount of rankings, quickly changed, and we were checking over 500,000-800,000 keywords every single night (and keep in mind this is just weekly checks).

The issues with lots of keywords

In order to do this politely (since we want to make sure we aren't abusing the search engines) we have to spread these out throughout the day, and for really heavy days collecting all those SERPs can take almost the entire day!

Since we don't want to prioritize certain users over others we have set the once a week limit which enables us to evenly distribute out collection over the whole week, and make sure that all rankings are always collected (since sometimes things can break when SERP layouts change, etc.)

Usability issues with different frequencies

Another challenge that has come up is that it is really important to a lot of users that all of their data updates on the same day.  This poses a problem when keywords and rankings are collected off cycle, since then graphs could end up with extra data points and the definition of "weekly change" throughout our UI becomes fuzzy (do you use the week delta, or do you use the last rank you checked?).  So we went for simple to make this more clear and usable for everyone.

So could we add more capacity, a new product, something?

Yes, to all of those questions.

We could make it so we could do a lot more keywords.  And we have considered on demand rank checking, or even just tracking keywords outside of the campaign.  However, it isn't something we are planning to do right now.

Instead we are focusing on improving the SERPs we do collect to include vertical results - like local, images and video - so you can track your performance in those areas.  We are also focusing on adding more functionality to the web app to make it even more valuable for each campaign - including adding social data, and more.

However, we definitely, definitely listen to our customers and use your feedback as a critical factor in all of our product planning efforts.  So if you think this is the wrong decision, or you want to tell us to build something - let us know here:

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests

We couldn't build what we do without your input and it means a lot to us to hear your feedback.

Hope that helps!

Kate

[MarkWill]

Thank you for the response. But doesn't that rather downplay the overall value of SEOMoz?

Another example - beyond keywords rankings - are the crawl diagnostics. SEOMoz did a great job of highlighting some issues with my site and I've been tackling them iteratively However, it's really irritating to have the "beat a deadline" to make any changes by a Saturday - and if I miss it have to wait two weeks to see the results.

I am not sure just switching to another service is the answer I'd to see a more responsive SEOMoz service.

Thanks.

[dumperama]

If you need your rankings right away, just use Free Monitor for Google.

I use it on a daily basis - even though it don't make sense for the same keyword set imho. But you all know, rankings can be some addictive stuff.

You can simpy import you're desired keywords and it will look them up for you.

Just make sure it runs in "Safe" mode.

I made my colleagues enter captchas on Google more than one time because I didn't run safe mode.