Community Discussion - What hypothetical tool could make your life easier?

[FeliciaCrawford]

This week's community discussion question is going to be a little more fun and whimsical.

There are always those daily processes we go through that feel like you're just going through the motions, or that feels like there just should be an easier way.

If you could wave a magic wand and create something to streamline one of your tasks, what would it be and do?

Me, I would love some sort of add-on for Google Sheets that would interpret my layman's terms for what I want to accomplish and provide the formulas/workflow to follow. I could see it being some sort of advanced voice-search AI for the spreadsheet-incapable. (If this magical add-on exists in some dark corner of the Internet, please, please share ;).

[ChrisAshton]

Perhaps I'm thinking a little too small here but for me, the tool that I wish existed wouldn't be groundbreakingly new, just a culmination of the broad tech stack most of us have on our monthly expense list. Rather than having 7 or 8 tools for various purposes, it would be fantastic if something existed to roll everything into one.

For example, a few of the tools we rely on heavily are for the following tasks in no particular order:

• Rankings and ranking reports
• Analytics/adwords reporting
• Campaign management
• Time recording
• KPI dashboards
• Backlink profile analysis
• Keyword research
• Internal communication

It makes sense that nothing like this really exists, at least not for an agency that operates as we do, since the time and financial investment of developing any one of those tools would be significant if done well. Not impossible, but unlikely to come about unless this unicorn tool was just using an API from the existing ones to import that data which may defeat the purpose.

A more realistic tool that I would love to see, perhaps as an addition to Moz Pro, is a competitor analysis tool. Something somewhat similar to the On Page Grader but allowing you to enter a small number of competitors and see their key metrics side by side to identify strengths and weaknesses at a glance. Something very similar to "Compare Link Metrics" in OSE but for things like Domain Authority, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Content Length etc etc, not intended to be a single report to build a campaign on but to raise some flags on areas to investigate in these competitor sites.

[GlobeRunner]

With social media becoming increasingly important--especially actual engagement, some tool that would help connect you with others on social sites that have similar interests and similar posts. Not only should the tool be able to identify people you should connect with and engage with, it should look at their posts and find similar posts that you're posting. This can't be done on one social network, it needs to happen across multiple networks.

Basically, it should tell you who to follow, who to engage with, and what you should share, when, to be most effective. It could even learn by your successes as well as your failures (something you posts no one reads and no one shares, etc.).

[LoganRay]

I'd really like a more robust XML sitemap tool with the following features:

1. XML Sitemap_Index_ generator - building these manually is no fun
2. Recurring XML sitemap tool

• Automatically generates a new sitemap based on a specified cadence, exports to specified folder
• Includes parameter to eliminate URLs based on canonical value, status code, URL type, robots disallows, et al.

I realize most CMSs have the ability to auto-update the XML, but it's usually pretty junky and doesn't allow for any exclusions or parameter-driven specifications.

[donsilvernail]

A tool that would reveal the specific Keywords used for a Google search to find my clients sites. That would make everyone's life easier!

[ChrisAshton]

I just thought of another one last night... I would do terrible things to have some way of knowing whether or not a domain has been penalised in the past.

The fact that a domain can essentially be rendered un-rankable if the history is bad enough is worrying. The fact that we can only possibly learn this the hard way is terrifying! No matter how well you manage expectations and communicate with the client, if you get stuck trying to rank a domain in that state you will fail and you will also be the one lumped with 100% of the blame.

I suppose this would require some co-operation from Google to make it possible which is likely why it doesn't already exist.