We recently launched our brand new tool SERPWatcher! If you haven’t tried it yet, you should check it out. We would love to hear your opinion!
SERPWatcher is a rank tracking tool and it was and still is a perfect opportunity to apply our UX philosophy. Moreover, it’s by far the most complex and fancy tool we’ve ever worked on.
It took us a while to discover and understand all the processes and situations that can happen in a rank tracker. We’ve learned so many new things.
Contents:
- Why rank tracker?
- Synergy
- UX
- Displaying the data
- Beta testing and feedback
- Our thoughts on SERPWatcher development
Why rank tracker?
Let’s start with our own experience with such tools. This is actually one of the top reasons why we decided to start working on SERPWatcher.
If you type “rank tracker” or “keyword position tool” to Google search, you’ll see countless results with great tools.
Now you may ask “Why would mangools develop just another rank tracker?” It’s because we think rank trackers shouldn’t steal time. Their point should be to quickly analyze keyword positions and provide a clear view how well a website stands in Google SERP.
Synergy
Mangools SEO tools now cover the entire process from keyword research through SERP analysis to rank tracking.
A deeply important reason to broaden our product portfolio was the synergy. KWFinder and SERPChecker are connected but there’s so much potential by adding SERPWatcher.
We’ve started leveraging it by a couple of features:
- Ability to import keywords from saved lists in KWFinder to create a new tracking in SERPWatcher
- Finding keyword suggestions and calculating keyword difficulty of tracked keywords from SERPWatcher
- Option to check SERP of tracked keywords thanks to SERPChecker integration
And this is just a start. There are many integration features on the to-do list.
Furthermore, our customers were asking for this as they wanted to use a rank tracker that would come with the same UI and ease of use as KWFinder and SERPChecker.
This is a comment by one of our users:
“Guys, I’m currently using a rank tracking software, but it would be great if you developed one. This way, I won’t need anything else but mangools SEO package.”
UX
Our focus was to simplify the whole process of rank tracking thanks to a tool built on the same UX principles we apply to mangools websites and web applications.
During last year, we came a long way trying to understand how UX is essential. It has to be a philosophy of the whole company to be successful.
We’ve developed KWFinder and SERPChecker with these main intentions to:
- Provide proven data in easy-to-use tools
- Create a user-friendly design and interface
- Support our users and learn from their feedback
Back in those days, we didn’t know how much attention we will pay to UX in the following months.
We develop and change every detail in the tools with UX in our heads. We know that UX is about going beyond customer’s requirements. Naturally, not each improvement can be beta tested but we try to count with all possible use cases before releasing one.
And what’s the hilarious part? We can work our fingers to the bone to create the smoothest UX but it will change constantly. It’s an endless process of being better towards our customers.
Bloggers usually highlight in their reviews that mangools tools are highly user-friendly and come with a fantastic interface. We hope the UX we implement every day will become our next trademark.
Displaying the data
There are thousands of users who would love to do SEO but they’re often confronted with raw data displayed in an unpleasant way so they don’t understand.
Likewise, there are thousands of SEOs and despite they understand the data, they’re tired of non-user-friendly interface or UX fails. Unfortunately, these are common issues when it comes to SEO tools.
The point of the design is how it works. Our main aim was to develop a time-saving rank tracking tool thanks to wise data usage.
Dominance Index
How to save time and track overall progress of SEO efforts at once? Well, that’s how we came to the “Dominance Index” (DI).
The Dominance Index is an aggregated metric that represents an organic traffic share based on current keyword positions and weights of the keywords.
DI substitutes routine position checking of each keyword. The point of rank tracking is what current positions represent and what’s their impact on organic traffic.
Thanks to the Dominance Index, SERPWatcher users can track overall progress with one key metric.
Dashboard
The SERPWatcher dashboard has evolved from our perspective on rank tracking and the proven 2-column design of KWFinder.
We wanted to include the most critical data on one screen. We’ve achieved it in our other tools, and based on the feedback, it’s one of the most favorite UI elements.
The left part is dedicated to tracked keywords while the right one deals with aggregated data and charts:
- Dominance Index
- Biggest changes
- Keyword position flow
- Estimated visits per month
- Keyword positions distribution
- Keyword detail
Beta testing and feedback
Thank you to the 1100+ beta testers who helped us to improve SERPWatcher! Your feedback and ideas were simply incredible. We’ve chosen the top 3 and awarded them with the 1-year Premium subscription.
We can’t imagine developing a product without beta feedback. Even if we did our best with design, features, and UX, there will be loads of ideas we would miss by not listening to you.
We’re delighted to say that we’ve incorporated plenty of your thoughts as new features, improved functionalities, and fixed bugs.
What’s more, there will be a lot of feedback in the coming months. SERPWatcher is a new tool, so your opinions and reported bugs will be appreciated. We aren’t wizards, there will always be some imperfections.
And what do we think about developing SERPWatcher?
Peter, founder & CEO:
“Not ranks, but traffic coming from your SERP positions and its changes over time are the important metrics for evaluating SEO efforts. That is the key point we considered during the whole developing process.”
Martin, front-end engineer:
“SERPWatcher is all about getting the idea of how well you are doing in SERP, quickly and clearly. We tried to make the complex data easier to understand. We’ve designed and implemented every little interaction with the tool with this in mind. Simple is hard, but we tried, and will always try our best!”
Frank, graphic designer & web developer:
“In mangools, it’s about how to serve important and hard-to-read data in a friendly way. Just forget about one-billion-screens rank trackers or all-you-can-imagine tools. KISS. SERPWatcher is really a complex tool, so it was a bit hard to put all essential parts into one screen. However, people are common with KWFinder’s 2-column layout so it was a good cornerstone for the tool. Hope you’ll enjoy. :)”
Maros, marketer:
“From my point of view, rank tracking is about overall progress. It’s not about being first. It’s about gaining quality organic traffic. SEO is part of my work, so I’m always the first example of a typical user of our tools. That helps a lot when we work on UX! PS: I mentioned all I wanted to say while writing this blog post.”
