Some of the features described in this article might be available only for Tracked Campaigns. Learn more.
Automatically track content changes and correlate them with ranking changes.
When you're tracking keyword performance, you need to analyze multiple sources to identify the factors driving ranking spikes or drops, and this can take up significant resources.
Changes in the content of the ranking page often generate considerable rank changes. Without a specialized tool, it's almost impossible to make a reliable correlation, as you'd need to be able to check the exact versions of the content before and after the rank change happened.
The Content Tracker feature automatically finds the main content changes that occurred in a specific timeframe and the corresponding ranking change, so you can easily connect the two while sparing time and resources.
The Content Tracker feature makes it easy for you to identify the changes that had an impact on your website's ranking, whether positive or negative. With this data, you can easily understand what strategies and tactics are working and replicate them to improve your performance.
On the other hand, if you see that a specific change caused a negative impact on your ranking, you can quickly identify the problem and take action to fix it. This could include rolling back to a previous version of the content, iterating on the content to improve it, or adjusting your overall strategy.
With the Content Tracker, you have the power to make data-driven decisions that can improve your rankings, increase traffic, and ultimately boost your clients' business.
You can use the advanced filter, or even better, our 'Quick filter' to view all of the keywords whose landing page content changes have led to a change in rankings.
On filtering, you can see the keywords with key content changes during the selected timeframe, which are flagged in the Page column in the keyword list.
You can see the summary of the content changes on the Landing page explainer:
You can view the detailed changes in the Historical Changes section (under the Performance tab), which provides a complete content change audit for any individual keyword in a selected timeframe in terms of the following attributes:
Keyword presence in the page title and headings: changes in the presence of keywords (full presence or partial presence) in the page title and headings
Content changes: a count of the total number of words on the page compared to the previous version; a count of the keyword occurrences in the content of the page compared to the previous version; the keyword presence (full or partial) in the content of the page.
Change date
The rank change recorded on each date
Landing page change: a different landing page from the website ranked for the same keyword between given dates, which affected the rankings.
How it works
1. Landing page crawling
Every time we refresh the ranks (daily) on both devices, if the website ranks in the top 100 we update the best-ranking page, title and description. The Content Tracker crawls the landing page where the keyword ranks.
2. Landing page analysis
Then, it parses and analyses the page and compares the content of the page to its previous version that was last crawled for content changes.
Title & H1/H2-H6: First, it looks at possible differences in the page title and headings.
Page content: It also looks at the page content by comparing the total number of words that are present and the keyword frequency.
3. Enriching keywords with content change data
Once the analysis is complete, the corresponding keywords are enriched with data about the content changes: details about the change, the change date, and the impact on the page rank.
Use case
In this example, the keyword "stick vacuum" is marked for page ranking improvements with a content changes flag under the Page column:
To view the details of the correlation between content and ranking changes, click on the icon, and then, from the pop-up, click View.
In the keyword sidebar, under the Performance tab, you can find the Historical Changes section:
This is a breakdown of the content changes related to the keyword in question which occurred on the landing page in the selected timeframe.
In this case, on January 7, the page title, the main heading, and an H2 heading were changed, and the keyword became partially present in their text.
You can also see that these changes have probably majorly contributed to improving the rank of the landing page by 20 positions since the last content change.
This data can help validate and improve your on-page SEO strategy by identifying changes that contribute to improving page rank and replicating them to improve website performance. Multiple changes over the past 30 days signal potential cannibalization issues and are automatically flagged as such.
With this, you can also understand when Google changes the title and description of your ranking landing page in the SERP and how that could impact rankings.
Conclusion
The Content Tracker feature is a powerful tool that can help you improve your website's search engine performance and stay ahead of the competition. Automating the process of tracking changes to your content saves you time and resources, allowing you to focus on other important aspects of your business.
With the ability to quickly identify changes that had an impact on your ranking, the Content Tracker gives you the insights you need to make data-driven decisions that can improve your search engine rankings, increase traffic, and boost revenue.