This document contains frequently asked questions that arise when working with SEO in TapClicks. You can quickly navigate to a particular FAQ by using the table of contents below.
Why don't I see my competitor's PPC data?
How often does the database refresh?
How do you calculate SEO traffic value?
What do the PPC keyword match types, Broad, Phrase, and Exact, mean?
Can I do just a one time site audit?
What are the site audit scheduling options?
How can I find profitable keywords that work for my competitor?
What insights can I get from your Rank Tracking report?
What is impression share and how do you calculate it?
How can I see individual keyword ranking chart?
How should I group my keywords?
What's the best use of the Keyword Group Performance report?
What is the value of Competitor's Higher Rank report?
How do you calculate Health Score?
How many issues does the New Raven Site Auditor track?
Can I do just one page or section of my site audit instead of the whole site?
Why won't the Site Auditor crawl my website?
How does the Site Auditor detect duplicate content?
I use WordPress--why do I have so many missing image title tags?
How long does the site Auditor take to crawl my website? Is it stuck?
Why don't I see my competitor's PPC data?
If we don't have data for certain URL or keyword, it could be due to any of these reasons:
- The advertiser runs only local PPC campaign in areas where we don't have any server coverage on.
- The advertiser does not run any PPC campaign.
- The advertiser's ads are not ranked in the Top 10.
- The advertiser ads does not appear when we crawled our data, which could be caused by:
- Low quality scores. Google may not show the ads if the quality scores are too low.
- Low budget or limited budget. Advertisers may have reached their maximum daily budget.
- Ads scheduled to appear only at certain hours of the day, or certain days of the week.
If you know the reason is NOT #1 or #2, you may want to read this article:
How do I find profitable keywords in the absence of direct competitors data?
If you can't find any PPC data from a particular direct competitor using New Raven, it means that direct competitor is not the best PPC advertiser to learn from. Keep in mind, we're only showing ads that are ranked in the top 10.
How often does the database refresh?
The database is refreshed bi-weekly. You can view the last refresh date on the footer of our homepage.
What is KEI?
KEI, or keyword effectiveness index, is our proprietary scoring system to indicate the effectiveness of a keyword for a PPC advertiser. KEI separates the signal from the noise and allows you to focus on the most important keywords. The KEI algorithm is based on the following logic: If an advertiser has been using a keyword for a long time, and they are still using it, it is likely working for them. If this is the case, then the KEI will be high. The higher the number, the greater chance that the keyword is a profitable one for the advertiser. KEI is calculated based on two factors:
- How long the advertiser has been using the keyword (Days Seen), and
- If the keyword is still being used (Last Seen).
Example 1: Suppose “Credit report” is a keyword phrase that has been used by Freecreditreport.com for 365 days and the Last Seen Date was yesterday. There’s a good chance that “credit report” is a profitable keyword for Freecreditreport.com, otherwise they would’ve stopped advertising using this keyword. Thus, the KEI will be higher.
Example 2: The keyword “credit report history” was used by Freecreditreport.com for the past 300 days, but the Last Seen date was 60 days ago. Why would they stop advertising using this keyword if it had been profitable for them? The fact that the last seen date was 60 days ago means that this keyword was no longer effective for them, thus the KEI will be lower.
What is AEI?
AEI, or ads effectiveness index, is our proprietary scoring system to indicate the effectiveness of an ad for a PPC advertiser. The algorithm and logic are the same as that used for KEI. The greater the AEI, the greater chance the ad is profitable for the advertiser. It's based on how long the advertiser has been using the ad and when was the last time they used it.
How do you calculate SEO Traffic Value?
The SEO Traffic Value is an estimated traffic value based on first-page organic keywords a company has in Google, Bing, and Yahoo combined. The value is derived from the equivalent PPC dollars should the company run PPC campaigns in all search engines with their organic keywords.
What do the PPC keyword match types, Broad, Phrase, and Exact, mean?
We monitor ads in Google/Yahoo/Bing that are triggered by the 90 million keywords in our database. We emulate end user behavior, not advertiser behavior. An example may help. If the keyword we monitor is "web hosting Linux", the advertiser may have used:
- Broad match on the word : Linux, it may trigger their ads.
- Phrase match on "web hosting", it may trigger their ads.
- Exact match : [web hosting Linux] it also will trigger their ads.
Unfortunately, we are not able to tell which match-types advertisers use. What we do know is which keywords trigger their ads. You may be able to get a sense of which matching approach they used by looking at the ad copy itself. If it's really well-targeted for the keyword in question, then it likely is Exact match.
Can I do just a one time site audit?
Yes. When you define an audit, one of the first things you'll do is specify the schedule and one of the options is One-time audit.
What are the site audit scheduling options?
There are three options when scheduling a site audit:
- One-time
- Weekly
- Monthly
With the weekly option, you can specify the day of the week. With the monthly option, you can specify the day of the month. You cannot specify the time of day.
How can I find profitable keywords that work for my competitor?
Our KEI (keywords effectiveness index) helps you find your competitor's profitable keywords. The higher the KEI score, the greater chance the keyword is profitable for the advertiser.
KEI Score > 70 = Very good.
KEI Score 50-60 = Good
What are SERP features?
SERP features are different types of content you can see on a search engine results page. These different types of content include organic listings, maps, questions, video, etc. Each icon in the SERP Features column indicates what type of SERP features you'll see on that page. For a full list of icons you may see and what they mean, see https://moz.com/learn/seo/serp-features.
What insights can I get from your Rank Tracking report?
There are five sections in the Rank Tracking report, each of which provides you insights into your SEO campaign. Here are the insights you can gain from each:
- Positions: Shows SEO ranked keyword distribution over time. What you want to see is the green line (displaying positions 1 – 3) go up over time while the red line goes down over time.
- Top Keyword Rankings: Shows keyword ranking year over year. When you click on the keyword you can see the graph over the years. You can also see what keywords trigger what SERP features. This helps you determine what type of content to create.
- Top Keyword Group Performance: Displays the groups of keywords and how you are performing for each individual group in terms of impression share and average position. This shows the relative strengths and weaknesses of each group, which helps you understand the best way to allocate budget. For instance, if you see a group with a low impression share, you may want to allocate more resources to bring that up.
- Top Competitor Benchmark: This displays competitor benchmarks for competitors you provide. It displays their number of keywords in each position range. Knowing that gives you an idea of how much additional budget should be allocated on content strategy to overtake a good performing competitor.
- Top Competitor's Higher Ranks: This answers the questions: 1) what keywords is my competitor ranking high for compared to my position, 2) what is the destination URL for that great content and 3) what kind of content is working for them?
What is impression share and how do you calculate it?
Impression share is the propensity for users, who are looking for the particular keyword at the top of the keyword group, to click based on the individual keyword's position. We calculate the impression share for a group by adding up all the percentages of all the keywords and dividing by the number of keywords in the group.
How can I see individual keyword ranking chart?
Click on the ">" at the Top Keyword Rankings list.
How should I group my keywords?
You should group your keywords by something they have in common. Here are four examples:
- Product categories: suitable for an eCommerce company (e.g., wedding gifts)
- Geography/location: (e.g., Nashville)
- By function: (e.g., auto repair)
- Buyers journey: suitable if only selling one type of product or service (e.g., awareness, decision)
What's the best use of the Keyword Group Performance report?
To quickly see the strengths and weakness of your SEO campaign at a high level. It tells you which area of focus you need to pay attention to—which keywords need a boost in impression share.
What is the value of Competitor's Higher Rank report?
It shows you what type of content you need to focus on that's getting success for your competitor. It's a way to prioritize your content development and content strategy.
How do you calculate Health Score?
The Health Score for your site is calculated on a 100 point scale, based on the number and severity of issues discovered. Fewer issues with a higher severity will decrease your score in the same way as higher numbers of less important issues. The Health Score helps users get a rough idea of how their site is currently performing and how much room for improvement is left for fixing the discovered issues.
How many issues does the New Raven Site Auditor track?
The Site Auditor will honor any path exclusions that you setup, so we will then only access and crawl the portions of your site that are relevant to your research.
Can I do just one page or section of my site audit instead of the whole site?
No, you can't tell it to crawl a specific page, but you could block everything other than that page.
What are path exclusions?
When crawling a website to conduct an audit, If there are pages or folders that aren’t important or relevant to the site, you can exclude them from the audit. For example, if you are intentionally disallowing a folder and its content in your robots.txt file, then you may want the Site Auditor to completely ignore those pages from its analysis report. You do this by adding a path exclusion.
Examples of Path Exclusions
A path exclusion can be a folder, a folder and everything below its path or an individual file.
- File:
/folder/file.html - Folder:
/folderor/folder/ - Folder with everything below its path:
/folder/*
If you add a path exclusion and then want to remove it (so it will be analyzed), simply remove it from the path exclusion list and it will be added back to your report.
Why won't the Site Auditor crawl my website?
Site Auditor will crawl most websites, but there are some situations where Site Auditor's page crawler is stopped in its tracks before it can accumulate data on your pages:
- Links on your website use JavaScript. Site Auditor only follows "a href" links and does not currently follow JavaScript links. That includes websites built using Wix, which are not supported in Site Auditor.
- You’re blocking IP addresses. Raven uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), so if you're blocking their range of IP addresses, Site Auditor won’t be able to crawl your site. You can write an exception to allow access to our specific user agent in this instance, which is as follows:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RavenCrawler/2.0; +https://raventools.com/seo-website-auditor/). This should also work if your site is in development and you're only giving access to specific user agents. - You're using security software to prevent unwanted traffic. Tools like Cloudflare and Incapsula are valuable for preventing DDoS attacks against your website, but it also prevents tools like Site Auditor from accessing and crawling your website. You'll need to whitelist our user-agent in order to crawl your website.
- Your robots.txt file is blocking search engines. If your robots.txt file is set to disallow page crawls (see robotstxt.org for details), our crawler will not be able to access your site. To allow Raven to crawl your site, add the following code to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: RavenCrawler
Allow: /
Because security is different from website to website, we aren't able to assist you with creating security exceptions. We can only provide information about how the crawler is accessing your website. Additionally, please note that Auditor will only crawl public pages. Anything behind a log-in screen or password will not be crawled.
How does the Site Auditor detect duplicate content?
Site Auditor scans each page of your website for what could be considered "readable" content. In doing so it attempts to exclude headers, footers and navigation. The readable content is then compared against the other pages in order to make a determination about which pages could be duplicates. The more that these pages overlap, the greater chance that they'll be flagged as duplicates.
I use WordPress--why do I have so many missing image title tags?
If you run Site Auditor on your WordPress blog or website, you may discover that many of your images are missing title tags—especially if you've diligently added title information to each image as you uploaded them into WordPress's Media Library.
The reason for this is that WordPress, as of version 3.5, doesn't pass title information into embedded images. Instead, it uses this detail internally to help with searching and sorting your uploaded images in the Media Library itself. To restore this functionality, you may want to consider installing a plugin like Restore Image Title.
Another thing to keep in mind is that not all of your images are managed in Media Library. In particular, images that have been hardcoded into your WordPress theme can be missing this information. If updating the title field in your images and applying those parameters via a plugin doesn't solve all of your title tag issues, be sure to check your template files to ensure that all of your theme's images have this information.
How long does the site Auditor take to crawl my website? Is it stuck?
Crawling a website with Site Auditor can take up to 24 hours to complete—20 hours maximum for the crawl, plus any time on the front-end queue and processing ends—depending on a few different variables:
Number of other queued websites
The first consideration is the number of other websites that are currently queued to be crawled. Site Auditor crawls roughly 70 websites at a time, which means that it moves through queued websites fairly quickly, but there are times when there's a backlog of websites for our systems to work through.
This is particularly the case on high volume days, like the first of the month. If your crawls are set on a weekly or monthly schedule, you can change the Next Scheduled Crawl date in the Settings page to avoid these higher volume days.
Number of pages to be crawled
Site Auditor will crawl a maximum of 10,000 pages and a large website will take longer to crawl than a tiny website with just a few pages.
You can speed up crawls of large websites by changing the Maximum Number of Pages to Crawl setting in the Settings page to a lower number: 50, 100, 250, 500 or 1000. That will cap the maximum crawl, resulting in faster completion of the crawl.
How long it takes to crawl each page
The realities and settings of your web server and website will also affect Site Auditor's ability to efficiently crawl your website. A website with poor bandwidth, for example, may result in Site Auditor crawling each page more slowly.
Additionally, if you've implemented a crawl-delay setting in your robots.txt file, this will insert a delay (measured in seconds) between each page. On a large website, this can inflate the amount of time it takes for Site Auditor to crawl your website.