You Can’t Put a Price on Reliability: Why SerpWatch Rank Tracker Was One of Our Best Decisions of 2020 [Case Study]

Introduction

CreatorSEO is an Ireland-based Digital Marketing company with a particular focus and expertise in technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

The company has been around since 2008 and has grown from strength to strength. Today it is one of the leading SEO companies in Ireland.

Clients range from multinational organizations with a global web presence to smaller operations that focus on a more regional presence.

The Problem: If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It

Every project begins with a measurement system.

Understanding and meeting clients’ expectations is only possible if you can measure the improvements you make to the clients’ experience.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it!”

While this quote is attributed to the founder of modern management Peter Drucker, it has been used by many people in different ways including the father of Quality Improvement W. Edwards Deming who put it this way:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

When it comes to SEO, the ranking position of keywords in search results is a top priority.

Needless to say, getting to the number 1 position is the holy grail of SEO.

What We Achieved Using SerpWatch

Major search engines like Google and Bing do not provide an API for extracting and analyzing rank data.

But measurement is key so we had to find an alternative way to extract the data.

We initially developed a program that could scan through results for a particular search phrase.

However, developing and maintaining this software was expensive and time-consuming.

Search engines change all the time so we continually needed to adjust our code to ensure accurate results.

Needless to say, this approach was not feasible.

Luckily, we found SerpWatch in 2020 and quickly realized it could give us the results we needed and a lot more.

SerpWatch became a key tool for our operation allowing us to measure and report ranking improvements to our clients on an ongoing basis.

The chart below shows real data for the average ranking position based on 65 key phrases in a global market measured on SerpWatch.

Now, switching to a different measurement system is always a risky thing to do.

We had spent a lot of time ensuring that our measurement system was reliable, accurate, and repeatable. After all, we owed it to our clients not to change without first validating any new system.

Our Findings (Spoiler Alert: We Are Impressed!)

We were in a fortunate position to be able to run our system in parallel with SerpWatch rank tracker so that we could compare results and thoroughly evaluate all features before making any strategic decisions about moving to a new system.

The results were impressive, to say the least.

Rigorous tests showed that there was no significant difference in the tests from the 2 systems and that SerpWatch ticked all our criteria for accuracy and repeatability.

Time then proved that the SerpWatch system is also reliable, so the decision was easy: we made the switch and retired our in-house solution.

The Benefits: Reliable and Up to Date Results

Not having to continually maintain our own system freed up a lot of time for our technical team and this allowed us to focus on the core of our business, namely the technical aspects of Search Engine Optimization.

The cost savings to us could be measured in hours per week but there is no price that can be put on the value of using a system that is reliable, always up to date, and managed by a professional and competent team.

It should be mentioned that SerpWatch also offered a number of additional benefits that we took advantage of, including Google Analytics integration, Agency Clients, Notifications, etc.

Then Along Came SerpWatch Version 2…

SerpWatch made vast improvements to the already fabulous Version 1 and they invited us to participate in the system evaluation.

However, as with the previous change, we had to validate the system before we could move our clients onto SerpWatch Version 2.

Rigorous head-to-head testing of the 2 systems showed us that the new system again ticked all the boxes and we moved our account to the new system.

At the moment, we are still running the two systems in parallel and doing some more testing but we are confident in everything that we have seen so far.

More than this, we are really enjoying all the new features and enhancements:

• Increased number of search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex)
• Improved performance charts with filtering
• Better choice of check frequencies…
• …and many more!

There is also API connectivity which we haven’t yet used, but this is high on our to-do list.

Conclusion

One of the most important steps we took in 2020 was moving to SerpWatch.

It saved us time and allowed us to focus on the core business. As a result, we no longer have to maintain a home-grown measurement system.

Our rigorous tests on SerpWatch proved the system is reliable and results are accurate and repeatable.