We’re excit­ed to announce that two new updates to our report­ing mod­ule have just gone live on Linkdex! You can find these enhance­ments in the Rank Track­ing and Report­ing mod­ules.

Answer Box Types

Mod­ern SERP land­scapes are dom­i­nat­ed by Uni­ver­sal Results, with one of the most pop­u­lar and sought after being Answer Box­es / Fea­tured Snip­pets. Con­tent for this result type typ­i­cal­ly comes in three main for­mats; as a list, as a table or as a para­graph, and you can now see this infor­ma­tion direct­ly with­in Linkdex.

We are pars­ing the indi­vid­ual types of Answer Box­es / Fea­tured Snip­pets and pre­sent­ing a seg­ment­ed view of data, to show more specif­i­cal­ly where key­words are rank­ing for each type of Answer Box. This insight can be cru­cial in gain­ing an under­stand­ing of the intent behind your key­word, as you will be able to see the exact type of Answer Box / Fea­tured Snip­pet that your key­word gen­er­ates and tai­lor your con­tent accord­ing­ly. For exam­ple. if Google is serv­ing a ‘list’ type of answer then you may want to con­sid­er chang­ing your con­tent to reflect this. The screen­shot below is an exam­ple of a list result which peta.org is rank­ing for, who have clear­ly struc­tured their con­tent to rank for a list fea­tured snip­pet result.

As you can see in the screen­shot below, we have updat­ed the ‘Uni­ver­sal Search’ col­umn under the Rank Track­ing tab. We have added three new icons for this col­umn, one being an Answer Box icon for lists, one for para­graphs and the last for table Answer Box results. This will enable you to view the oppor­tu­ni­ties to rank for dif­fer­ent kinds of Fea­tured Snip­pets, by tai­lor­ing the lay­out of your con­tent to best suit the dif­fer­ent Answer Box results. You can iden­ti­fy the Answer Box types that you rank for by the green colour­ing of the respec­tive icons. For exam­ple, in the screen­shot below the ‘Enter­prise SEO Plat­form Author­i­tas’ key­word, has two green icons, mean­ing Author­i­tas ranks for two dif­fer­ent Answer Box results.

Weight­ed Answer Box Report Com­po­nent

Rank­ing for a large num­ber of Answer Box­es does not always mean you will ben­e­fit from high vis­i­bil­i­ty if those key­words have lit­tle or no search vol­ume. Our Weight­ed Answer Box report com­po­nent uses search vol­umes and com­peti­tor data to demon­strate the val­ue of an Answer Box / Fea­tured Snip­pet.

If you head over to the Report­ing sec­tion of the Linkdex plat­form you will see that there are two com­po­nents, Uni­ver­sal Results through Time (Line), and Uni­ver­sal Results through Time (Table). If you select either, you will see that you can view your Uni­ver­sal Results by Vis­i­bil­i­ty Share % in addi­tion to num­ber of key­words.

We have down­loaded some data to give you a feel for the kind of insights you’ll gain from our new updates…

The screen­shot below demon­strates how many key­words each domain is rank­ing for in the Answer Box­es over a 30-day peri­od.

Fig­ure 1.

As you can see Domain 5 and 3 seem to have the best num­ber of rank­ing key­words over time, while Domain 2 remains quite far behind with lit­tle or no improve­ment.

This next screen­shot demon­strates Visi­bil­i­ty Share between these 5 same domains, across rank­ing Answer Box­es.

Fig­ure 2.

The graph shows find­ings which are quite dif­fer­ent to those we saw before­hand. If we focus on one time peri­od i.e. 07/07/2019, Domain 3 and 5 both rank for four key­words (see Fig­ure 1). But if we look at Fig­ure 2 for the same time­frame, the Vis­i­bil­i­ty Score tells a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Even though the actu­al num­ber of Answer Box­es has decreased over the last 30 days, Domain 5’s Vis­i­bil­i­ty Share has remained high. The Vis­i­bil­i­ty Share is sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Domain 3 which sug­gests that the key­words that Domain 5 is rank­ing for have much greater search vol­umes than the key­words Domain 3 is rank­ing for. The dif­fer­ence between the two graphs is astro­nom­i­cal and this shows us how impor­tant it is to have a look at both Vis­i­bil­i­ty and the num­ber of key­words rank­ing, as they can give very dif­fer­ent and poten­tial­ly mis­lead­ing results.

Com­bine this with the new Answer Box types fea­ture, described above, and you will have our best ever insight into how and where you are win­ning and los­ing.

We hope you’re as excit­ed as we are about the new insights this will give you.

Look out for new updates as we are cur­rent­ly work­ing hard on refresh­ing the UI design, the seam­less inte­gra­tion with the new Author­i­tas plat­form and Google Big Query/Google Data Stu­dio inte­gra­tion.

As always, get in touch if any of these updates are of inter­est or if you have any thoughts or com­ments!