Data Analysis & Tools

Diving Deeper Into Data

SEO tools are widely available today and many of them are even free.

While these tools may offer some helpful insights, very few of them can actually deliver good data points.

Here at LOCOMOTIVE, we believe in making data-driven decisions. That is why we have developed a variety of tools that provide a deeper look into your data that cannot be found elsewhere.

Let’s face it, due to stretched resources and budgets, making the case for new work can be an arduous process. Our tools offer actionable data points and can greatly reduce what would be manual work at other agencies.

This enables our clients to stretch their budgets further, substantially lowering billable hours without compromising quality. With new data available, you will also have the necessary business cases for any recommended website optimizations.

PageRank Analysis

We believe in the power of quality internal linking and are always looking for ways to improve internal linking for our clients. We’ve developed a process that allows us to identify which sections of the website are benefiting more or less from internal and external links. This process allows us to see if important sections such as product pages not getting enough equity/authority from links that can allow them to rank well. This way we can establish linking strategies to improve visibility of important sections such as product pages or service pages

Keyword Categorization & Clustering

When optimizing, prioritizing and monitoring a client’s site, it’s critical that we gain insight into the performance of the client’s key service areas and products. But categorizing and organizing all ranking queries for a site can require extensive resources. To solve this issue, we developed a custom clustering algorithm that builds out the semantic keyword categories for a site’s ranking queries.

This gives us a view of keyword growth by relevant keyword category as well as how competition is performing. For example, if a site ranks for 1,500 unique queries related to “cloud computing,” our algorithm offers better understanding of these keywords by clustering them under the same semantic category. Performance is then gauged on a category level, instead of having to look at individual keyword rankings. This can be much more informative when building strategies.

CTR Anomalies

This tool shows us the pages on your site that are ranking highly for relevant terms, but users are not clicking on them in search results. This data is then coupled with page-level query data, which provides clues on how to best optimize the title tag and meta description of the page.

Using this process, we can align on-page elements with the user’s intent, therefore improving click-through rates. Tools like this will help us to identify low-hanging fruit opportunities for your team to focus on.

Automated Meta Descriptions

We utilize GPT-3 and a custom algorithm to generate compelling page descriptions at an ideal length for websites with many pages requiring review. While we generally prefer copywriters to generate benefits-focused messages, this is a great workflow for large sites with poor or no descriptions.

Traffic Forecasting

To help clients plan and budget correctly for the upcoming year, we developed a tool using Prophet (open source software from Facebook) that can predict future traffic. This gives clients insight into yearly and weekly seasonality, while providing us with predicted monthly session numbers and the overarching, high-level trends.

Max Loss Analysis

Using Google Analytics, we pull down all the pages your site is ranking for and the clicks they have generated over a long period of time, usually 3 to 4 years. We can then identify the pages that have lost the largest number of clicks over time. This helps us see pages that were once doing well but have now significantly dropped off and should be prioritized for optimization.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a very time intensive process that involves multiple steps in order to be done effectively. At LOCOMOTIVE, we have developed a proprietary algorithm that streamlines this process, reducing manual time by 75%. This of course, helps stretch our clients’ budgets further.

The tool pulls Google Search Console data from the past 30-60 days, applying a score to each query pair. We are then able to estimate which pages would benefit from moving the query up a couple of position in the SERPs. The tool also identifies relevant site pages that are good candidates to link back to target pages and reviews ngrams within the site content. We can then more efficiently manage content editing through a manual process.

Rankings Heatmap

To evaluate the effect of algorithm updates, redesigns, navigational changes, etc. on rankings, we developed the ability to heatmap site click and/or position ranking data. This helps us to see at a high level view if there are any downward trends. We can then pull the queries from that section for further analysis.

Content Briefs

We’ve developed a proprietary in-house content brief tool that offers a comprehensive analysis of a topic. This helps us to optimize your content for user intent and to be competitive.