Rank Ranger Blog

Back when AMP first entered Google's mobile News Box in early 2016, the faster loading, lighting bolt indicated, cards were a rare novelty. All of that has now changed as the number of AMP optimized news articles appearing within Google's Top Stories on mobile has skyrocketed across the globe.

We promised that 2017 would be a year full of new third party integrations and Rank Ranger reports. With our first integration of the new year, we didn't disappoint. Expanding the digital marketing reach of Rank Ranger's software into new territory, we're quite excited about integrating CallTrackingMetrics into our platform. An industry leader, CallTrackingMetrics enables users to track call attribution across multiple channels such as PPC ads, social media, etc. Now, with our CallTrackingMetrics integration, users can track their incoming call data in unique ways that only Rank Ranger can offer.

As another year has come and gone, Rank Ranger has continued to develop and expand with full throttled force. 2016 saw our most prolific year to date with the development of what felt like an endless slew of updates and additions. We've kept to our core value of providing the most comprehensive and customizable SEO and digital marketing software available. Having set sail in 2016 with our own vision, as well as that of our customers (via the WeDevelop program), our development team doubled-down on their efforts to bring you a set of superlative additions to Rank Ranger's already rich SEO and digital marketing platform.

Now that we've entered the new year, I guess taking a look back at December's SERP is a bit nostalgic. For those of you who eagerly let go of 2016 and quickly embraced 2017, I promise this post will not retroactively kill another beloved celebrity, nor will it make any mention of politics. This post will however fondly review some interesting changes to Google's SERP as December 2016 presented us with some important happenings.

In what is a highly competitive environment for local businesses, maintaining a competitive edge is more important than ever. One of the major obstacles local businesses face has been ensuring their local citations are congruous and up to date. To help businesses manage this somewhat odious process, Yext offers local businesses the ability to track down and update any outdated or incorrect listings. But really, Yext offers a lot more than just that. With its array of analytics, Yext reports back on various aspects of your Facebook page, indicates Yelp page views, etc. As testimony to the efficiency of our WeDevelop program, Rank Ranger now enables you to integrate the range of analytics offered by Yext.

Well, it's been quite the year for the SEO world. Watching events unfold day in and day out, you almost forget just how significantly things have changed for those of us within the SEO community. Sure, there have been the sort of blockbuster breakthroughs (think Penguin 4.0 or organic AMP results). Still, a lot of the changes we saw in 2016 were brought in slow increments, piece by piece (just compare Google's Knowledge Panel as it is now to what it was a year ago). While there's no way to cover all of the significant changes 2016 has brought, I'll do my best to highlight the ones I think mattered most... and you might be surprised to see what made the list.

The vast differences in the language of voice search when compared to written search truly precludes dual optimization. There is no way simply using long tail keywords is going to bridge the linguistic divide as many in the SEO world have expressed. Unless Google can bridge the gap for us, creating content that meets the linguistic requirements of both search mediums is going to be rough. Don't believe me? Read on...

The availability of Bing Webmaster Tools insights within Rank Ranger makes our platform a one-stop shop when analyzing Bing rank and page traffic performance. Per usual, we've made an effort to afford you data insights in a customized and visual manner that is not only aesthetically pleasing but allows for easy data navigation as well.

It's interesting to see Google hone in on a specific SERP feature(s) in such a concentrated manner the way it did this past month of November. Couple all of the format changes and additions to SERP features with the removal of Notable Online and a bug that decimated SiteLinks globally, and you have yourself a really interesting month on the Google SERP.

As Google's Penguin 4.0 update recently completed its rollout (according to Google), I thought I would take this opportunity to provide the complete history of this Google algorithm and its updates. Up until recently, an update to the Penguin algorithm was a very big deal (particularly for those penalized by it). Until the most recent version, the only time a site could recover from a Penguin penalty was when the algorithm underwent an update. Now Penguin operates in real time (more on that later), but the question is how did we get to this point?

Voice search is the latest and greatest craze to hit the SEO world. If you've been keeping up on your SEO reading it's very likely that you may have come across some sort of article testing out some sort of voice search device, be it Google Home or Amazon Echo, etc. But with this latest phenomena to enter the search universe has come concern of how to optimize for the new search medium. Almost uniformly the SEO community has taken an approach for how to best optimize for a future that includes voice search, but what if we're all wrong? Just in case you were wondering, I think we're way off base here as an industry and in this two part series I'll tell you why.

In honor of the Monday of all Mondays, Cyber Monday, we're going all out with Marketing Dashboard mania!  

Take dashboard reporting customization and communication to a new level - this Marketing Dashboard gives new meaning to the term "white label"!  Check out the demo dashboard and lock in your special Cyber Monday pricing.