In SEO, the only real truth is that things change quickly. Instant, customizable alerts mean you’ll always be the first to act.
Here’s a common situation most people in SEO face at one time or another: your rankings are up, traffic is skyrocketing, conversions are at an all-time-high—and then, suddenly, Google flips the script on you. The strategy you’ve been using to dominate organic rankings has become a threat to your continued success.
Now imagine that it’s 11:00pm on a Wednesday evening. What’s more, it dawns on you that the algorithm change or penalty actually happened days or weeks ago. You’re screwed.
We’re seeing this happen with increasing regularity.
You’re on top, then Google changes the rules of the game, and now you’re on the defensive. You’re scrambling to scrub offending items from your site or your link profile, and you’re alternating between obsessively checking Webmaster Tools for penalty notifications, checking your rankings in the SERPs, and searching SEO industry blogs to try to figure out what precisely is going down.
At this point, you probably haven’t gotten any sleep in days, your personal hygiene is suffering, and your boss might hate you. This is no way to live.
Alerts provide a better way
What if you could get an alert the second something major shifts in your site’s organic SERP visibility?
What if you could customize and prioritize the alerts you receive, and base them only on the key metrics that matter most to your site?
You could rest easy that you’ll know the precise moment your average ranking drops out of the top-ten, or a certain high-value keyword loses more than three rankings points, or a particular keyword segment is showing a lot of volatility.
That’s why I consider customizable, instant alerts to be absolutely indispensible in any large-scale rank tracking and SERP analytics regimen. Custom alerts can’t help you get rid of bad backlinks, or remove unwanted content from your site, but they can take the fear and uncertainty out of monitoring a large-scale SEO campaign.
Combined with fresh daily ranking data, custom alerts mean that you’re no longer a slave to Webmaster Tools and industry blogs, because as soon as something that matters to you changes, you’re going to know about it.
Before the blogs have analyzed the algorithm change to death.
Before you even see the penalty notification in Webmaster Tools.
And, hopefully, before your competitors realize that anything at all is happening.
With this kind of first-responder advantage, you’re not wasting time obsessively checking the SERPs, you’re sleeping better, your hygiene is top notch, and your boss is probably about to give you a massive raise. Look at you go!
STAT’s custom alerts
Most of STAT’s clients are tracking large keyword lists for multiple sites in multiple markets and locations, and many are tracking their competitors’ sites at the same time.
For them, instant, customizable alerts are the backbone of responsive SEO. That’s why they have been a part of STAT’s tracking platform since day one.
Rather than scrambling to stay on top of their ranking data constantly, our clients just spend some time up front strategizing about their alerts. Then, if they don’t see any STAT alerts in their email every morning, it’s business as usual. They can focus instead on doing what made them so successful.
Want to find out more about how our clients use STAT to stay on top? Check out our client snapshots.
And if you’re ready to start exploring STAT’s custom alerts for yourself, just talk to us to set up a trial account.
