First let’s check the traffic we are currently recording as twitter traffic, from the GA dashboard:

• Open the Traffic Sources Report
• Open the Referring Sites Report
• Filter the source to include “twitter.com”

This should be all of my twitter referrals right? Nope! A Majority of twitter referrals will show up as Direct Traffic in Google Analytics!

Well how can this be?

Most twitter users do not use twitter.com itself; they use applications such as Tweetdeck. When a user clicks on a link in one of these 3rd party apps since they are not in a browser they do not send any referring information. When Google Analytics doesn’t receive any referral information it puts all of these visits (your twitter referrals) into direct traffic.

Below is an advanced segment which shows this in action:

You can clearly see that a small increase in twitter referrals can actually correspond to a much larger increase in direct traffic!

Fortunately there is a very easy way to fix this! Before you shorten the URL in twitter add the parameter “utm_source=twitter”, being careful to include the “&” or “?” as necessary to mark this addition to the URL as a parameter. Now whenever anyone clicks on a link in a 3rd party app, the Google Analytics will record the visit as coming from twitter instead of as a direct visit.

Want more information than that? You can add another parameter such as “utm_campaign=CAMPAIGNNAME” switching out CAMPAIGNNAME for the name of the twitter campaign you are currently running. Now not only are you correctly tracking your twitter traffic but you are following Avinash’s Rule “Segment or Die!”. This is particularly useful if you run more than one twitter campaign at once and need to be able to tell which of the campaigns is the most effective.

Have you launched any twitter campaigns recently? Did you tag the URLs correctly? Look back through your Google Analytics data and see if you get any spikes in direct traffic the same time you get spikes in twitter referrals. If so you may have under-estimated the value of your twitter campaign!

Would you be able to detect the attack and stop it before it caused any damage? Or would you be stuck trying to cleanup after the attack was finished?

Recently at SEER interactive while examining some unusual traffic to a client’s website, we discovered that Google Analytics was picking up an attack against the site as legitimate traffic. With a little digging we found several key indicators which can help you determine if the traffic to your site is actually traffic, or if some of it is an attack against your site. Also included in this post, is a recommendation on how to handle an attack once discovered, and the end of this post is an Alert you can setup in Google Analytics that should email you if someone starts to launch attacks against your site.

The site we were examining recently had a dramatic increase in direct traffic without an outside event to explain the increase such as a newsletter, TV appearance or marketing campaign. Since direct traffic gives us very little information, the best place to start is the Visitor report. Once inside the Visitor report, we can take a look at the map overlay, drilling down to the city level to see which cities are responsible for sending the most traffic to your site.

Carefully examine the top cities in this report, do the top cities seem appropriate to be your top cities? Does the amount of traffic from these seem to be much greater compared to the rest of cities sending you traffic? This is the first sign that you are suffering from an attack, as these top cities can be the launching point for these attacks.

You will often see a sudden sharp increase in traffic, starting on the day the attack was launched.

Hmmm… Does this graph look strange? It should!

Simply seeing an increase in traffic from a city is not in itself enough evidence to say that you’re site is being attacked. If you drill down into the city report itself there may be a couple more indications that you’re site is being attacked. These factors are also useful if the attack has been sustained for a long period of time you and there is no sudden sharp increase of traffic to alert you of the attack.

• Pages / Visit will be closer to 0 than site average.
• Time on Site will be closer to 0 seconds than site average.
• % Of New Visitors will be closer to 100% than site average.
• Bounce Rate for your site will be closer to 100% than site average.

Why do these numbers indicate that your site is suffering from some kind of an attack?

Most Bots do maintain sessions.

Since bots do not maintain sessions, each time the bot queries your site it appears as a new visitor, who immediately leaves, resulting in a bounced visit. This is also why the attack shows up as direct traffic in your reports. If you receive a significant number of these visits your numbers will be skewed to look like the results listed above.

It’s important to note that depending on the amount of traffic your site gets, and the nature of your site, you may not see all of these trends. However if you see a significant difference in these stats compared to other referring cities there is a good chance that your site is being attacked.

What Next?

You have determined that you’re site is suffering from an attack, or you suspect that it might be what are your next steps?

Since Google Analytics is just a reporting system, and it cannot collect the IP addresses of visitors, Google Analytics cannot do anything besides alert you that your site is suffering from an attack.

Since you can’t use Google Analytics for this, the best idea is to contact your hosting company. If you give your hosting company the cities from which you believe the attack is originating from they should be able to determine what IP addresses the attacks are coming from and block them, thus ending the attack.

Google Analytics Alert

If you would like to setup an Alert in Google Intelligence to email you if any of this behavior is detected follow these steps:

• Login to the Google Analytics profile you wish to setup the alert on.
• Select “Intelligence” (beta) from the left navigation.
• Select “Create Custom Alert”.
• Enter an Alert name such as “Hacking Monitor”.
• Select Period -> Day
• Check Receive Email Alert

Now for the fun part, the alert itself! Do not include quotes when entering these values in Google Analytics.

• Select this applies to -> “City”
• Select Condition -> “Matches Regular Expression”
• Enter Value -> “.*”
• Select Alert me when -> “Visits”
• Condition -> “% Increases by More than”

Example Alert:

The final two values of this alert will depend on your preferences and your website. If your website doesn’t receive much traffic you are probably safe putting a high value here (500%+ increase) as any attack will likely result in this increase in percentage. However if you run a larger website, you’ll need to decrease this number, since the attack will be a smaller percentage of traffic from that city. The last value is if you want to compare to the previous day, or to the same day the previous week, this will depend on the traffic patterns of your website.

The end result of this alert will be Whenever any city sends you a dramatic increase in traffic, the primary indicator of an attack on your site, send an email alert.

The last thing to keep in mind is that this alert will only let you know of hacking attacks that run Javascript. If the attacks do not run Javascript then the Google Analytics code snippet will not trigger and the attack will not be recorded as a visit.

Have you noticed this kind of activity on your site before? Do you make use of any other Google Analytics alerts to protect against foul play?

Comments and Questions welcome!

In order to create the ROI Calculator we first needed to know how much each successful conversion was worth to a client. For example if a conversion was worth $10 dollars to a client and SEER got our client 100 conversions, SEER could then say these conversions we were responsible for profited the client $1,000 dollars. Using the number of search conversions along with their value, and the client’s contract information we could calculate the actual ROI for investment in SEO.

At first this seemed like a fantastic idea, after all who wouldn’t be happy with a report that says your investment was a profitable one. However during the implementation of the Calculator a number of issues were discovered which made it’s creation far more difficult. Below are the two major problems in the creation of our ROI Calculator.

Existing Search Traffic

When SEER begins a project with a client we create a Google Analytics profile which captures only organic search traffic. The ROI Calculator then used the Google Analytics API to get the number of organic search conversions (excluding the company’s brand name) and used that number to calculate the ROI. However it was quickly discovered that this would only work for clients that had little to no search traffic to begin with. If a client already had search traffic, there is no way to separate which search visits were a result of SEO efforts, compared to which search visits would have reached the client without SEO, therefore attributing conversions would be near impossible.

This meant any client which already had search traffic would need to have an average search revenue calculated before the ROI calculator could be applied. Not only does this add a significant level of complexity to the calculator itself, but calculating average search revenue is often very difficult. What if the client recently changed domains, or launched a new website? What if the client is seasonal? Calculating an average search revenue before SEO efforts can be very difficult, or even impossible and without that information the ROI Calculator would be very inaccurate.

Lifetime Value of a Customer

The other difficulty in the creation of the calculator was the difficult concept of “Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer.” Often times once a visitor has found a website and completed a conversion, they will come back in the future and do it again. Therefore you can’t simply say, “This conversion was worth $10,” since that person could return and complete the same transaction 5 times, making that new customer worth $50 instead of $10.

The first problem with this concept is that it is somewhat difficult to understand or explain. This resulted in a large amount of confusion and time spent explaining what we were looking for and why. The second and much more significant problem with this concept is that this number is almost always an approximation, as the data necessary to calculate an exact value is almost always unavailable.

Realizing it was time to pull the plug

Here at SEER Interactive we evaluate ongoing and new programming projects every couple of weeks to determine their priority. SEER takes into account the estimated time needed to complete the project, the value to customers, and how much help it will be to SEER employees.

After a careful analysis of the ROI Calculator’s obstacles we realized: The initial time estimates of the project skyrocketed after these problems were discovered, our calculations were going to be based on approximations, and the project was causing a significant amount of confusion, taking up a lot of our client’s time.

Knowing the cost of the project was far higher than originally anticipated we wanted to make sure the project was still of value to our clients. However since these issues resulted in several approximated values, and the ROI Calculator relied on these approximated values, our ROI calculation would compound the inaccuracies of these approximations making the final result even less accurate. Therefore SEER decided that it would be better to spend our time improving our client’s ROI even more, rather than creating a report that shows them an approximated dollar value of returns.

After Pulling the Plug

Once it was decided that the project was no longer of value to clients and it needed to be scraped, the question became what next? We have some of this data already, is there anything we can do with it? After all, we didn’t want to see the project become a total waste.

Our answer: Use the goal values already built into the Google Analytics system. While it won’t allow us to calculate an ROI due to several of the same issues, it will give us additional information for analytics purposes and will require almost zero setup time and maintenance. Furthermore clients will no longer have to compute LTV since we will be using the conversion values to optimize the site and analyze trends rather than compute an actual monetary result.

Do you have any projects which are causing more problems than they are solving? Would you know if you did?

Any comments or feedback is more than welcome!

There are three primary ways in which programming can be used to improve a business:

• Business Process Automation
• Business Process Improvement
• Business Process Re-Engineering

While a developer without domain knowledge can improve a business in some of these ways, only a developer with solid domain knowledge can effectively use all three methods.

Business Process Automation

Business Process Automation (BPA) takes an existing business process with a human component and either eliminates or reduces the amount of human involvement necessary. The benefit to a company comes from the reduced amount of labor necessary to complete the task. This is the method that requires the least amount of domain knowledge to be an effective developer. While this method is incredibly useful and can save a business large amounts of time it is only one way in which programming can improve a company.

Recently SEER has been working with the Google Analytics API to further automate its reporting process. This automation has allowed SEER employees to focus on higher level strategies, instead of performing this recurring task every month.

Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement (BPI) takes an existing process, which may or may not have a human component, and improves upon it. The benefit to the company can vary significantly depending on the process that is being improved. Some examples include, gathering additional information for employees to make decisions on, or creating reminders instead of having to remember to check something on a regular basis. A programmer without domain knowledge should be able to implement these improvements. However a programmer with domain knowledge should not only be able to implement these improvements, but has the ability to design improvements of their own, making them significantly more useful.

SEER has recently revised its keyword tracking systems. Not only has the process been automated, but it has been significantly improved in two ways. First, the new system is pulling several additional metrics giving SEER employees much more information to make decisions about keywords. Second, due to the automation of the system the process can be run four times more often. This allows SEER employees to track keywords much more often, and therefore detect movement and trends much sooner.

Business Process Re-Engineering

Business Process Re-Engineering (BPrE) is the creation of a completely new process. As with BPI the benefit to the company varies with the process that is created. BPrE can have a massive impact on a company as it often creates entirely new opportunities. A developer with no domain knowledge will most likely be unable to apply this method. On the other hand, a developer with domain knowledge will has the opportunity to create these processes which may have otherwise not been discovered by the company.

SEER has been working with the Google Analytics API and the Adwords API to enhance our SEO / PPC integration. By combining information from both of these APIs both our SEO and PPC teams have new tools for research and analysis. Without having a developer with domain knowledge, it would have been very difficult to understand how these APIs could be combined to generate useful information.

Why Developers Are Key to BPrE

The reason developers are seldom included in the design and evolution of a business process is they are often viewed simply as developers of an already existing business. Developers are not normally hired to re-design the business, but to perform BPA and BPI services. There are two fundamental reasons why a developer is essential to re-designing a process:

• The Developer knows what programming/they can do!
• Developers have a different way of thinking than most!

As simple as these two statements are they are more often than not overlooked. If designer of the project or of the business does not have a development background, it is difficult for them to fully understand how a system is going to work. Things which may be very simple to develop may appear to be impossible to a non-developer, or vice-versa. This can lead to unpractical expectations or missed opportunities which may have been very simple to include in the process. It is important to understand that simply having a programmer on hand to sign off on requirements and time-lines is not including them in the BPrE process. SEER interactive however, includes the development point of view from the ground up when designing new processes and tools, making for a far more accurate time-line and expectations.

Developers are used to thinking in terms of if statements, loops, arrays, functions, classes, object orientation, databases, recursion, and any number of problem solving techniques. Anyone without a development background most likely does not think in this manner. In fact, I’ve yet to meet a non-developer who understands recursion, never-mind has the ability to apply it as a potential business process solution. This gives developers a different viewpoint and a very different problem solving tool set.

By applying these problem solving methods to business practices developers can be very good completely redesigning a system or a business. By viewing developers as problem solvers, and not just programmers, a company can significantly increase the chance of developing a new system which may be able to revolutionize the company. However in order to take advantage of BPrE, the developer must have domain knowledge!

The second tool to be examined in this process is MajesticSEO.

MajesticSEO – The Good

• Crawled 127 Billion pages
• Over a Trillion URLs
• Anchor Text Indexed
• Link Tags Indexed (Redirect / Alt Text / NoFollow etc.)
• Data Export via CSV and API

Majestic SEO has crawled over 127 billion pages and over a trillion unique URLs. This makes MajesticSEO only the second company in the world to publicly announce that they have discovered this many URLs. The big question though, is how does all of this data help SEO campaigns? Well before we can discuss how the data impacts an SEO campaign we must discuss all of the data and features Majestic provides us with. Once you register a domain with Majestic, you gain access to several reports. I will discuss what I think are the most useful below.

The Anchors report shows you the most popular anchor texts to your domain, along with how many external links and referring domains use that anchor text. Additionally the report shows an ACRank spread, which is Majestic’s way of ranking the importance of a website. This report is useful to get a sense of what people on the web are using as anchor text to link to your site. What makes this report even more useful is the ability to drill down into a specific anchor text.

Once you drill down into a specific anchor text from the Anchors report, you are shown information about all of the links that point to your domain. This information includes, the source, its ACRank, the date the link was found, the target URL, the target URL’s ACRank, along with several source flags. The tags indicate what kind of link is pointing to your site including; redirect, frame, nofollow, images, deleted, mention, and alt text. This is where the real power of Majestic comes into play.

Imagine if you were able to find every link to your domain on the web along with these tags. Optimizing your links is now a simple matter of filtering the criteria you want, and emailing a webmaster and requesting they make a small change to an already existing link. Trying to target a specific keyword? Email webmasters requesting your anchor text to be changed to that keyword. Having access to all of these tags allows you to address these existing links in whatever way best fits your linking strategy.

Perhaps one of the most useful tags is the mentions tag. The mentions tag indicates that your domain has been referenced in plain text, however no link is provided. Creating a list of all the pages that mention the name of your site but do not link to it is an easy way to generate links.

Other reports allow you to break down this information in different ways. Some of these reports include referring domains, specific URLs within your domain, IP Addresses, Subnets, and even countries. How you use these reports will depend on the SEO strategy you are using, but these reports give you several more ways to analyze your data. I also should mention one of my favorite reports, the daily update report. I will get into why the daily report is one of my favorites later in this post.

Another major plus of MajesticSEO is the ability to export the data via a CSV or via an API.

MajesticSEO – The Bad

• No Keywords
• ACRank = Bad Metric

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of MajesticSEO, as they themselves are quick to point out, there is no ability to sort by keywords. The reason for this makes perfect sense when you consider the 127 billion pages that they have crawled. Storing all of the links from these pages alone requires a huge amount of processing power and data storage. In order to allow for keyword searching, MajesticSEO would have to index the entirety of all 127 billion pages, and then provide a search feature to sort through all of the data. Needless to say that is a tall order, especially considering MajesticSEO is primarily focused on finding links, not the keywords on the pages.

Another small drawback, which again MajesticSEO points out themselves, is that currently the ACRank of a site is only based on how many pages link to the website the link is on. Here is MajesticSEO’s summary of the issue:

“It should be said that in it’s current design it suffers from a serious drawback: actual ACRank weight of backlink is not taken into account, so a page with one backlink of ACRank 1 will have the same ACRank value of 1 just like the other page that has got backlink with ACRank of 10 (or 15), clearly the latter page should have gotten higher ACRank as being linked to from the more important pages intuitively makes the page they linked too also more important.” Full Definitions: MajesticSEO Glossary

While MajesticSEO plans to correct this problem, in the meantime they have implemented the ACRank spread. The ACRank spread shows the ACRank backlinks broken down by their ACRank. However after doing some spot checking on some of the websites that have high ACRanks I am very weary using ACRank as a metric for evaluating a page until this problem is fixed. Here is an example:

One Webpage http://cfsxiba.1freewebspace.com (I’m not linking because I don’t want to give this page anymore links!) has an ACRank of 10, which according to MajesticSEO should have at least 1,024 links pointing to it. I assumed it would be a somewhat reputable site, fair assumption right? Wrong. When the site loads it takes you to a black screen with the words “Loading…” displayed in white. After a few seconds I scrolled down and saw a list of URLs and what appeared to be some porn spam. I don’t know about you, but I DO NOT want a link to my site from there. Now the page was indexed on April 30th 2009, so it may have been changed or hacked, but not a risk I’d like to take.

Since the size of the database rivals that of Google, another thing to consider is what if Google, or any other search engine, hasn’t indexed a page yet? Getting a link from that page won’t be very helpful, and it’s probably not a very valuable site! Furthermore if no one else has found it, it becomes very difficult to determine if it is a quality page without manually analyzing it.

MajesticSEO – The Ugly

• OLD DATA

Old data and the problems that result from it is the major problem with MajesticSEO.

While the vast amount of linking information is by far the draw of MajesticSEO, as with most large databases, it also causes some issues. Due to the fact that pages are constantly changing it is difficult to trust information that was gathered over a year ago. Depending on the type of domain you are optimizing for a large number of the pages MajesticSEO finds may not exist anymore, or may have been altered. While Majestic will tag links as deleted when it can no longer find them, this requires MajesticSEO to check the page again, which normally won’t happen for a significant period of time.

As with most large databases focusing on the internet, this inaccuracy of data is to be expected. When crawling billions of pages it becomes very difficult to make sure the entire database is kept up to date. This means however that before the information can be used in an SEO campaign it must be cleaned up and verified to ensure the accuracy of the information. This inaccuracy of information is why I believe that the Daily Updates report is incredibly useful. Since the links were found within the past day, the information provided by the Daily Update is far more accurate than the data collected years ago.

Takeaways

• Tracks a HUGE amount of links
• Links may be old, pages may not exist, or the link may have been taken down
• ACRank is not a good metric to determine priority
• Some sort of script to evaluate sites is necessary
• If you can implement a system to evaluate links found my MajesticSEO, it can be VERY powerful

MajesticSEO allows you access to more linking information than any other tool I’ve seen. However as with other tools of this size the accuracy of old data becomes a problem. Combine this problem with the fact that the ranking metric MajesticSEO uses (ACRank) is a poor judge of the quality of a site sorting through existing links becomes a huge problem. So what is the best way to make use of the data we do have?

Start with what we know for sure: At some point every link in MajesticSEO’s database pointed towards your site with the given tags. What makes this awesome is this is all you need to know!

Here at SEER we have built a tool that checks several data points to determine what we believe to be the quality of a website. Now all we need to do is sort these links by the quality of the website and bingo, we have a list of sites linking to us in order of importance!

This is a great first step but it leaves us with a few problems, does this site still exist / link to us / are the anchors the same? Well it should be pretty clear from whatever site ranking tool you use if the site still exists. As for if the site still links to us and if the anchors are the same? The last thing you’d want to have to do is manually check this for each link. Good thing is this is easy to find out! Building a web crawler to explore a web page for this information is a relatively simple task.

The power of Majestic SEO comes from the fact that it is able to find so many links. However at the current time Majestic doesn’t seem to do a fantastic job of ranking the links or keeping the information up date. If you have a system in place that can automate this part of the process MajesticSEO has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Follow me on twitter for more tool reviews!

The first tool to be examined in this process is SemRush.

SemRush – The Good

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that is stored in the database. SemRush is “Currently indexing top 20 results on 30 million keywords across more than 13 million domains.” That is a TON of data. SemRush also boasts several tools including:

• Google Keywords – Shows keywords that rank for the current domain.
• Adwords Keywords – Shows any Adwords ads that land on the current domain.
• Competitors in Google – Shows the domains that share keywords with the current domain.
• Competitors in Adwords – Shows the domains that have Adwords ads running for the same keywords on the current domain.
• Adwords Ads Texts – Shows a summary of all Adwords ads found landing on the current domain.
• Potential Ad Buyers – Shows you can sites that buy AdWords on your keywords.
• Potential Ad Sellers – Shows you sites with visitors that are the same with visitors from your AdWords campaign.

Full descriptions of these tools can be found at: SemRush

So what makes all of these tools and this data useful for SEO and SEM campaigns? I will highlight some of the better uses of the first four of these tools.

The Google Keywords reports allow you to find a significant portion of the keywords that you rank in the top 20 for (this portion will vary depending on how mainstream the site is) along with several metrics describing the keyword. Perhaps the simplest use of this tool is to look at the combination of position and search volume. If there is a keyword with a high search volume ranked just off of the first page, in position 11 or 12 perhaps, if you specifically target that keyword you may be able to push it to the first page with minimal effort. Competitors in Google is best used for keyword discovery and to keep an eye on how much traffic your competitors are getting on shared keywords.

The Adwords Keywords report is most useful when examining a competitor. If you are managing Adwords for a domain, you will have access to that accounts Adwords information. Therefore the best use of this tool is to enter a competitor’s domain to examine their Adwords strategy. By entering a competitor’s domain you will be able to see a majority of keywords they are bidding on along with several metrics, including estimating volume and cpc. Using this information it should be possible to find quality keywords to add to your campaign.

Competitors in Adwords is best used to find sites that share a significant number of keywords with your domains and give you a brief overview of how they are doing compared to your campaigns. If you discover competitors using this tool, and then use the Adwords Keywords report you have a very powerful combination.

The most powerful aspect of this tool is the ability to export data, specifically via the API. Considering the amount of data stored in SemRush’s database, examining the data manually is far too time consuming. By allowing data to be exported, you may apply rules or filters to the data, and only examine the results that meet the criteria you are looking for.

SemRush – The Bad

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that can be searched; however the size of the database is also its Achilles heel. Data displayed in reports can be incorrect or outdated. This may include Ads being displayed in results that don’t exist, or incorrect rankings in keyword reports etc. Let’s take a minute to look at why the size of SemRush’s database is the cause of this problem.

SemRush tracks over 30 million keywords, and several statistics associated with them. For each keyword at least several queries must be made.

• The Google Search Engine
• The Adwords Traffic Estimator
• The Google Keyword Tool

This results in millions upon millions of queries that must be made to Google. All of the while SemRush must make these queries in such a way to not incur any penalties or be throttled. As a result gathering this data takes a significant amount of time. The three most recent US database updates have been on June 9th, August 3rd, and September 29th, which means the database is
currently being updated roughly every eight weeks.

While SEO campaigns often require several months to generate results SEM campaigns do not. Many SEM campaigns are seasonal; react quickly to changes in the marketplace; or are otherwise changing frequently. While it is beneficial to have access to competitor’s ads, you cannot run an Adwords campaign using just a snapshot of the marketplace every eight weeks.

Another major concern about SemRush is that it only tracks the first 20 results per keyword. There could be many instances where it would be useful to know keywords beyond simply the first 20 results. Also, SemRush only tracks the ranking for one search engine, Google. While Google is the most dominant search engine with approximately 65% of the market share all other major search engines are ignored. If there were ever a large shift in market shares, SemRush may not be a good indication of how terms are ranking.

SemRush – The Ugly

The dangerous part of SemRush however, is all of that information does not magically appear in the database upon the update! It has to be gathered over the eight weeks prior. The problem is you do not have any way of knowing at what time during the process the keyword you are examining was added to the database. Here is an example (this is an extreme example to illustrate what COULD happen not what is most likely):

On September 29th after the database was updated you checked a keyword, and it says you are ranked #1 for that keyword. You do a search for the keyword and to your surprise; you aren’t even on the first page! How did this happen? Unknown to you, the keyword you are checking was the very first of the 30 million keywords to be updated, and that query was run on August 4th. Since then your ranking tanked and you were no longer on the first page.

If you do not check your keywords and this happened it would take until the next update of the database for you to be alerted to this problem.

While this is an extreme example to illustrate the danger, it’s important to understand that when the database is updated, to some extent all of the data is old. It could be only a day old, or it could be significantly older than that, though no older than the last database update.

Takeaways

SemRush has a massive collection of data, and a number of very useful tools to go along with it. It is great when used to get an idea of the marketplace, find out information about competitors, and to find new keywords. However due to the size of the database, and therefore the infrequent updates and potentially inaccurate information displayed, it is not the best tool for tracking any of your domains. Additionally in order to make best use of the data, some methodology must be created to avoid manually sorting through the huge amounts of information.

***After contacting SemRush’s support team they indicated they try to update their database each month. According to their news feed I haven’t seen any updates in less than eight weeks, but if they do start to update the database once a month the impact of the negative issues discussed will be reduced.

***If you have any other favorite uses of SemRush, or disagree with any aspects of the post, please feel free to comment!