The Ayima Reporting Tool is our in-house SEO tracking and intelligence tool. It does a wealth of data collection and analysis to help you manage and improve your SEO.
Our SEO reporting tool lets our consultants understand how you are performing within your target niche, highlights potential trouble areas, and accurately measures the impact of our changes on actual rankings.
Why the ART - Case study
Here’s the scenario: You’re an SEO manager for a high-street retailer. Every week, you see percentage drops flash up in red within your reporting dashboards. Your traffic from Google continues to drop and drop. It shows no signs of slowing.
The drops haven’t coincided with any major site changes. And, there’s definitely no drop in search volume for ‘dresses’. Everyone needs dresses, and you’re one of the first names they should be coming to.
You dig through your data and through several possible factors, but nothing fits. Try as you might, you can’t figure out a direct cause for your SEO decline. You’re frustrated. You rest your head on your hands and take a deep breath.
This is exactly the position a client came to us in. Performance drops across the board with no apparent cause.
The first thing we did was set up tracking on the ART, the Ayima Reporting Tool. It quickly told our consultants where the drops were coming from and produced two silver bullets.
- Our historic data from the fashion sector showed that their individual rankings had been dropping for a while now. It showed exactly when this started. Not only this, but their medium to longer tail keywords were the earliest to be hit before the traffic leaks spread. This suggested that the damage stemmed from product and category pages.
The exclamation points here are where the tool has flagged different URLs appearing for these terms. This was a major clue that led our consultants to the smoking gun itself:
- The URL ranking report showed that these longer tail keywords had moved from facet URLs optimized for these terms to broader category pages. The category pages were not optimized for these longer tail terms. It suggested that Google either:
- Did not value these facet URLs, or
- Was unable to crawl and index them
The root cause of the issue was that the website’s mobile navigation was coded in JS and required user interaction to access, making it invisible to Google. This meant Google was never finding the pages it should be ranking. This resulted in rankings shifting from optimized facet pages to category pages.
Our consultants were then able to devise a solution. We helped the client to:
- Restructure the facet navigation to one that Google would clearly be able to crawl and thus index
- Put into place methods to remove low-value facet URLs
The results were incredible: We tracked a 107% increase in market share for the client within their market on the A.R.T. This translated to a 180% increase in non-brand clicks in a matter of months. In other words, they nearly tripled the number of prospective customers browsing their site.
This was all made possible by the Ayima Reporting Tool (‘ART’), the keystone of our SEO technology. We built the ART in 2005 to give us the insights we couldn’t get with any other SEO tool. We’ve kept it at the cutting-edge ever since, and our latest version of the ART launched in 2020.
Built by SEOs to uncover the insights we need, it gives us the ability to see things that others don’t.
The next section will run through some of the features, how they unearth these insights, and how the ART drives SEO performance.
SEO Reporting Tool - ART’s Core Features
The ART is an SEO reporting tool with the ability to dive deeper and unearth more.
Key reporting features include:
- Keyword rank tracking
- Tracking keyword batches and groups
- Monitoring international performance
- URL ranking report
- SEO Ranking Distributions
- Market share over time
- Long-term SEO tracking
We set up our clients on the ART and provide direct access as part of our SEO consultancy services. If it looks like the ART could help you and your business, get in touch with our team to learn more.
Keyword rank tracking
The basis of the ART is the ability to track keyword rankings for your individual target keywords
For example, here’s a report that tracks Amazon’s rankings for high-volume searches in electronics:
This lets us closely monitor high-priority terms. The ART stores the search volume for each, letting us quickly prioritize based on potential traffic.
The keyword rank tracker lets our consultants dive right in at the keyword level. It means that we can drive and track individual strategies for the highest priority terms.
Knowing the exact lay of the land for every single keyword also unearths fresh insights. One such example is the performance differences between long and short-tail keywords that we encountered at the start of this article.
We track over 2.25 million search terms within the ART across a wide range of sectors. To give you an idea of the sheer scale of this, Ayima Pulse tracks sectors through 70,000 keywords. If you’re looking to track a vast number of keywords, the ART is the way to do it.
Tracking SEO keyword groups
The ART lets you group keywords together into different reports to get more granular insights.
You might have a master report to track your entire keyword roster. Then, you might group certain product ranges together, such as this report tracking performance across ‘trainers’:
This is entirely customizable. We can highlight opportunities, then work with the client to create, implement and track category-specific strategies.
We often use this reporting structure to test strategies and implementation at a category level. We could monitor the impacts of changes at a product group level using the ART. We can then roll them out across the site, confident in their strength.
When producing content, we might also track performance on our target keywords. This measures the impact of our content batches.
Finally, we can measure the performance of keyword groups on specific sections of Google. For example, for an Online Reputation Management campaign, we might set the ART to track valuable brand keywords on Google News around the world.
Track international performance
We set up each report within the ART at the market level. The below reports, for example, track Google rankings in Nigeria, South Africa, the USA, and UK.
We use this tool to ensure that our strategies are driving localized success. We can spot any markets where performance is not improving and act accordingly.
For international campaigns, or campaigns with very specific target markets, the ART gives us the power to look both local and global.
URL ranking report for SEO
The URL ranking report tracks which of your URLs have ranked for a certain keyword, and where.
For example, you can see two different URLs ranking for the term “stocks and shares ISA” below:
The ‘deviation’ and ‘intermittency’ are metrics that highlight content cannibalization. If you have a search query jumping between multiple URLs, it shows that Google isn’t sure where it should be sending the traffic.
As with the dress keywords at the start of this piece, it can also guide you to deeper laying technical issues.
If Google doesn’t know where to send your customers, it’s likely that they won’t have much of a clue of where to go either.
The impacts can be profound and can directly impact your rankings. But, users landing on unoptimized URLs or the incorrect URL altogether can also harm performance indirectly. This impacts user metrics such as time on site, page visits, conversion, and bounce rate.
Removing duplicate content has been known to drive ranking increases of around 40 positions on search terms with volumes of 10,000+ for our clients. The ART shows us exactly which URLs are causing these issues.
SEO Ranking Distributions
The Ranking Distribution Report displays where your keywords are showing. It groups your rankings into buckets, such as positions 1 to 5 and 5-10, and tracks these over time.
This is important because not all keyword positions are born equal.
It is well publicized that the top positions win big, with click-through rates of up to 29%. And, CTRs drop off rapidly from here.
For this reason, moving a keyword up three positions from 29 to 26 is going to have a minimal impact compared to moving a keyword from position 4 to position 1.
The ranking distribution highlights these opportunities. We can focus on the keywords currently taxing to the bottom of the runway in positions 3-10. These are the keywords poised to take off with some well-placed optimizations.
The Ranking Distribution Report ultimately lets us focus our optimizations on the most impactful areas.
Tracking SEO market share
The ART tracks who appeared in the results for each keyword group, and what position they appeared in.
We use these metrics to calculate each competitor’s ‘market share’. The market share is the proportion of the available traffic that they are estimated to attract. In a world in which search volumes are constantly changing, market share provides a clear, objective metric to track your market standing.
This gives you an overview of the entire market, such as below for UK fashion.
Using the ART, you can clearly identify who’s ranking high on each keyword. You then just need to unearth the ‘how’.
Using the ART to track our market share also gives us an insight into the intent of terms. We can identify this based on the proportion of terms that have gone to informational sites, affiliates or vendors. We can then position our content for maximum effect.
Staying ahead of the market requires you to know what the rest of the market is doing.
SEO Competitor Analysis Tool
This tool tracks market share over time, revealing search market trends at a glance. For example, the UK Insurance sector:
We use this data to power Ayima Pulse, our free SEO market intelligence tool, which is available for the entire SEO community.
Our consultants can label particular dates, noting major site changes, for example.
We also track and mark algorithm updates within this report.
Or we can note major internal site developments. Notation gives us a complete institutional memory of when and how changes might have impacted your SEO performance.
The competitor analysis report gives us a full view of the market:
- Identify your natural organic competitors by plugging in all keywords your site ranks on.
- Track core competitors on each keyword group. We monitor who are the top performers within each of your product categories.
- Spot the big risers and fallers. Our SEO team can then unearth potential causes for their improved ranking and use it to keep you ahead of the market.
Long-term SEO tracking
Unlike GSC, which only stores data for 16 months, we capture data for as long as we need it. For example, below you can see the US travel market over the last 5 years:
This reveals a calamitous early-2021 for SkyScanner in the US, after some promising gains in the previous years.
We also store individual keyword data. For example, positions for a randomly selected company on flight terms.
Our data warehousing lets us capture the longer-term trends for both individual keywords and domains as a whole.
How the ART helps us drive SEO strategies
The best way to show how the ART powers SEO strategies is to show how it impacts our work on the ground. Or, more appropriately, ‘in the air’.
“Flights to” terms (e.g. “flights to Paris”, “flights to London”) are big fish to catch for any travel provider. They’re both high volume and they display significant purchase intent.
An algorithm update resulted in a website's destination index pages cannibalizing their ‘flights’ traffic. These pages hadn’t been optimized, and rankings quickly dropped.
We were able to identify this cause rapidly using the URL ranking report.
We could also see, from using the competitor reports, that this had also impacted the many websites that had similar setups.
This gave us the information we needed to build a strategy. We could remove the index page, and point Google to the dedicated, optimized flights page.
The ART enabled us to track specific routes as a keyword group. We could prove the cure on a test group, before rolling it out across the site.
You can see the impact on flights to Singapore below.
The change removed cannibalization completely. And, it drove ranking increases across the board. With our competitors still struggling to identify the causes, our site’s rankings stabilized about 5 positions higher than they had been before.
The new structure and stable rankings built us a solid foundation from which to go after even more SEO growth for our client.
The ART turns vast amounts of data and provides us with the insights we need to make the right decisions.
Are you interested in using the ART to power your SEO strategy and reporting? We provide keyword tracking and access to the ART as part of our SEO consulting services. Get in touch with the team here if you’d like to learn more.
You can also learn more about our other in-house SEO technology here.
