At ManageWP we pride ourselves on exceeding expectations. Although the tool is best known for its key features such as one click updates and automated backups, there is a whole lot more than meets the eye once you start digging. Every time we get feedback from a user who has been blown away by the sheer number of features available, it brings a smile to our face.
A month ago we featured ManageWP’s awesome ranking tracking feature. That in itself deserved a post of its own, but we didn’t even touch upon the accompanying SEO statistics. Now it is time to take a look at how ManageWP can save you from searching high and low across the web to find the key information that can help you in pushing your sites to the next level.
Statistics Galore
Most website owners are a little bit data-obsessed. It comes with the territory – if it’s not analytics data, it’s the number of comments, or your rank in Google. We are certainly no exception – which is why we thought it would make your life a lot easier if we took all of the data relating to your site that you could possibly want to know about, and put it right within your ManageWP dashboard.
Not only that, we figured that you would want control over what you see. What’s the point in throwing a whole load of data at you that you don’t need? So the first step in tailoring your SEO statistics is to choose what you want. Just hit the SEO option in the ManageWP sidebar, and click on the “Settings” tab. On the resultant screen, we are interested in the checkboxes in the right hand side widget:
Here you can select what you data you want to see for your sites. SEOmoz fan? Check the box. Interested in social signals (who isn’t these days)? Give the Twitter, Facebook and Other social media boxes a click.
You may be wondering what kind of information you can expect to see by checking these boxes. Let’s take a look at some of the key data.
If you check the “Google” box, you will be presented with three key pieces of information:
Like it or not, PageRank is still an important factor for many reasons. More important however is how many pages of your website Google has indexed – if this number is markedly different from the actual number of pages on your site, you may want to take a look at what the problem is. Without wanting to state the obvious, an unindexed page cannot be found in Google.
Finally, you will see the time at which Google last stored a cached version of your site. If this date is starting to look a bit old, you may want to investigate.
Traffic
If you want to start a healthy debate amongst website owners, just mention the likes of Alexa and Compete. Some people consider them useless, whilst others swear by them as a means of measuring the popularity of one site against another. I personally have noted direct correlations between actual traffic spikes and Alexa data, so my opinion would be that these services offer value. But why go to the sites directly to get the information you want when ManageWP can pull it straight into your dashboard?
Backlinks
We all know that links are the currency of the web. We also know that not all links are created equal – that separate linking domains are more valuable than links from the same site, that links from .edu and .gov sites are typically more valuable than those from .coms, and so on. So we pulled together a diverse number of data points for you to analyze:
Social Media
Did someone mention social signals? Oh, wait – everyone did. You can’t turn a corner in the SEO world at the moment without reading about how important social signals now are. Which is why getting a healthy number of links from various social media sources is now extremely important. ManageWP can help you keep track of where you are getting mentioned, and how much:
On-Page Links
If you have anything more than a passing interest in SEO, you have probably heard of “link juice”. Some SEO theorists argue that inbound links bring link juice to your site, and certain outbound links take it away. With that in mind, it can be useful to monitor the on-page links on your site, to see how much link juice you may be losing:
Domain Info
The domain information via ManageWP can be useful for a variety of reasons:
For example, if you have plenty of sites, you may want to keep an eye on upcoming domain expirations. If a domain is expiring soon, you can check the registrar and process the renewal.
Export Options
You may want to do more than simply observe the data available to you. With that in mind, ManageWP provides you with two export options – CSV and PDF. If you export the data into CSV format, you can of course fiddle with the data to your heart’s content. Or if you simply want to see the information in a more digestible format, PDF will do the job.
Is There Anything Else You Would Like To See?
We are committed to putting the most relevant and useful information right in front of you, so you don’t have to waste time looking elsewhere. With that in mind, please tell us – what other information would you like to see? What else can we bring into the ManageWP dashboard for you? Let us know in the comments section!
Creative Commons image courtesy of FindYourSearch
Chris M.
Is there a way to track different keywords for different sites? From what I gather, you can only track the keywords that you input on ALL of the sites… I would like to track certain keywords for certain sites, and not for others. But it is not clear to me how this can be done. (I have a Business account).
Tom Ewer
Hi Chris,
The tool should be able to see the relevance and only track relevant keywords to relevant sites. Please contact our support team if this is not the case and we’ll get right on it.
Cheers!
Tom
Serena Star Leonard
It seems you can’t sample these features in the trial. What a shame!
ManageWP
Should be able to, we’ll check.
AffordableSrvcs
I cant find the bulk add post or page option
peterbutler
I’m currently paying Authority Labs $99 a month for their keyword/site position tracking.
I’d much rather give that to you guys and upgrade if you can give the same features and functionality. Not often you hear peeps say ‘let me give you more money’
west17media
I hope they don’t charge that much or expect an upgrade. For that price we use Raven’s SEO Tools and that’s better value. Right now this feature ‘creep’ would at most be a minor upgrade to the existing feature set and also some of the features are a bit too steeply priced, so I think this is a chance to add value down (across) the value chain rather than just to the top.
peterbutler
So how is this feature progressing?
thebizguys
Creating reports to be sent to clients was the first thought I had once I understood the power of the SEO/Rank Tracking dashboard….so another vote for the direct email option!
Maybe that could include when the domain needs to be renewed, because I do manage client sites that have their own registrar. One of my clients almost lost his domain…because the renewal date passed and his site went down. Lucky I caught it…email notification right out of dashboard would be a nice feature. Thanks for your consideration.
west17media
Great idea on the domain renewal and right in mWP’s wheelhouse too. Good idea man!
marketermatt
Where are you getting your link data from? SEOMoz’s Linkscape?
And I would also like to know if there’s a way to have those reports mailed out to clients? That would be an amazing feature!
peterbutler
What about the ability to have these reports emailed out to the site owner, as in our clients.
Melanie Richards
I’m wondering the same.
west17media
Just submitted this idea on another blog post. +1 for the email reports idea.
ManageWP
We are working on this. THe first step would be to get an URL for the SEO report that you can share with the client.
west17media
This is a good intermediate step. I imagine that’s a quicker way to get this solution out there and then we can more easily way for a more advanced solution. I like it. Smart move!