SEO Moz Keyword Ranking Tool

[casper434]

The SEO Moz keyword ranking tool is useful and fairly accurate but it would be more useful to know why the ranking changed. Can the tool provide any insight in this regard?

[jeremycbray]

Hi Chris that's a great idea.

I use all the tools as a holistic solution, i audit all my client pages, look for the fixes make the changes and then monitor.

Thats the best way i have found, simply because, as you know there are so many factors going on in the serp.

love to see what others are saying

Jeremy

[malecce]

Yes is a gret idea

The ideal would be to make a software where you register what you have change every day in the your websites and actual positions and more add the date and content of crawler changed.

and then try to analyze the data.

Ciao

Maurizio

[Dr-Pete]

I can't argue that that would be useful, but to tell you why your ranking changed would basically require reverse-engineering the algorithm. If we could do that, believe me, we would

In terms of future directions, I see us heading a couple of places (this is partly my knowledge of the product, and partly speculative):

(1) Tracking more aggregate metrics, as opposed to individual keyword rankings (including aggregate rankings). The value of any individual ranking is declining as the SERPs become more diverse.

(2) Tracking broader analytics, including landing-page metrics. This may be a necessity as Google strips away more and more keyword data. We expect [not provided] to only increase, for example.

(3) Separating keyword visibility from keyword opportunity. Visibility is a broader sense of how well a keyword or group of keywords are performing (not just ranking, but CTR, social, etc.) and opportunity would be areas that you may be missing out on. I think opportunity metrics would be a lot more actionable than just rank-tracking, but it's not an easy task.

This is something many people on the team put a lot of thought and time into, but as Google and SEO both evolve, the target is always moving.

[casper434]

Instead of reverse engineering perhaps a comparative analysis back to the previous measurement point may work? Such a comparison could, in theory, highlight the inputs that changed which may shed light on why the ranking changed. As always theory may be more difficult in practice but if it could be done the why it happened would provide more value than just what happened when it comes to the SERP change

[Dr-Pete]

In theory, it would, but right now we don't have a lot of data about actual changes on any given site. We could track the ranking changes, but not the causal factors. We're working on metrics like what we use on MozCast - basically trying to figure out baseline "flux" for any given campaign, so that you can understand how much movement is normal vs. unusual. Even that is tricky. Rankings fluctuate all the time (even on page refresh, in some cases), so step 1 is sorting out what's abnormal. Then, we have to tie it to things like known algorithm updates and on-page changes.

[EGOL]

In short, the answer is....

It is impossible to accurately say why Google changed the rankings.

Anybody who says that they can do this is full of BS.  There are hundreds of variables.