Revved Up Rankings: History & Filtering at Your Fingertips, New in Moz Pro

Today I'm proud to announce some new features in Moz Pro that help you get a lot more value out of your keyword rankings reports. You can now view your full rankings history for any campaign, select specific date ranges for your charts and tables, better segment your rankings data to get a clearer understanding of your performance and visibility, and effectively manage large campaigns with numerous keywords. Did I also mention it's lightning-fast? To get started, visit the keyword rankings page in any of your campaigns or test drive Moz Pro with a free trial today.

Want a quick recap? Tori goes over the highlights in this quick 1:20 minute video!

Historical rankings: getting from 12 to infinity

The major value of today's release is that it enables customers to visualize their campaign’s entire rankings history. This is thanks to an ongoing effort to completely overhaul our data assembly architecture. I’m excited about today's release because it lets loose the first phase of this overhaul initiative, and marks the end of the 12-cycle limitation in our rankings reports.

As of today, timeframe selection has no bounds. You can report on rankings data with start and end dates anywhere in the life of your campaign, up to and including the entire campaign’s history, even on campaigns with long histories and lots of keywords. Your full rankings histories have been liberated.

12 weeks of keyword rankings history in Moz Pro — a limitation until today

Success! A campaign’s entire rankings history in Moz Pro

And more new features

In addition to unlimited rankings history, we're giving users the freedom to compare rankings, search visibility, engine performance, and competitive metrics within customizable timeframes. We want our users' reporting needs to drive the application, and not vice-versa. Here are some other features available as of today:

• Customizable timeframe selection. In addition to weekly and monthly views, you can now select and display start and end dates, and export reports for specific timeframes. Rankings deltas (changes over time) are now calculated over the duration of the selected timeframe.

Calendar controls to select your data display range

Quick-select menu for common timeframes

• Flexible, universal filtering. Fast response times and full keyword history means no more limits on how you view and filter your data. Use the new universal filter to narrow displayed keywords by locality, labels, and keyword text.

• On-the-fly aggregate calculations. Rankings summaries, deltas, search visibility, and universal results all update on-demand whenever you select a new timeframe.

• Flexible, fast sorting. Data points — like difference between rankings by engine — that previously took so much overhead to calculate that they couldn’t be sorted in-place, are now easily sortable on-demand.

Sort by anything, anywhere

And performance improvements, too

These new features are built on an entirely new architecture. We’ve been running the new and old systems in full parallel mode for about two months now to ensure everything was ready to switch over. This has also given us the opportunity to measure some key performance improvements:

• 30X faster pipeline. Our data assembly and storage processes run up to 30X faster, eliminating delays between data collection and in-app availability. The low latency between data collection and availability is what facilitates the delivery of full campaign histories.
• 20X faster server response times. For most in-app requests, our response times are dramatically faster than the previous system. We’re seeing rankings datasets delivered in 50 ms for average-sized campaigns (compared to 800+ ms in the previous system). We’ve also moved many calculations into the browser, reducing network calls and wait times for filter and sort requests.

Why we did all of this

Rankings data is important to our customers

Keyword rankings data is a core component of the Moz Pro suite of tools. We gather localized and national data on millions of keywords each day across hundreds of search engine locales so that our customers can analyze their SEO keyword performance. Moz Pro users spend the bulk of their time in the Rankings section, where we present metrics that include mobile and desktop keyword rankings, historical SERP analysis, local and national keywords, search visibility scores, and competitive metrics.

The data was already there

We store deep historical rankings data going back to the moment of a campaign’s creation. While this information has always been accessible via historical rankings CSV downloads, we’ve been aware for some time that this is frustrating and this data would be much more useful in the UI. What held us back was our architecture. If you’re interested in the technical challenges and how we overcame them to deliver these new features, I offer a detailed explanation on our Developer Blog, covering the project background and architecture that makes all of this possible.

Where we'll go next

We plan to round out our rankings overhaul project with backend and UI updates to the Analyze a Keyword page. We’ll also speed up Page Optimization, at which point the entire corpus of ranking-related data will be on our new platform.

Ultimately, all of our numerous datasets, including crawl and links, will be assembled and stored on the new architecture, unlocking new features and delivering data faster as we go. We’ll continue to be agile and iterative, progressively releasing updates as soon as they’re ready.

So go check it out!

To experience the new features in the rankings section, visit your ranking report in any Moz Pro campaign. If you’re not already a Moz Pro subscriber, why not take a free trial and see how our software can help you do better marketing? As always, we would love to hear your feedback below.

I heard you like updates (23 February)

On the heels of the improved rankings functionality described above, here’s another hot new feature we just released: Google algorithm updates in your rankings graphs.

Using data from MozCast, a service that tracks changes in Google over time, we overlay major changes in the Google search algorithm on top of Search Visibility and Rankings data. This is particularly useful for identifying possible impacts of algorithm changes on your sites’ rankings and organic search traffic. This new feature includes data overlays in the rankings section charts and algorithm update names, dates, and descriptions in hover text.

Google algorithm updates, using MozCast data, plotted on the Moz Pro Search Visibility graph.

In the screenshot above, you can observe the correlation between Google’s July 17 Panda update and a significant improvement in my Search Visibility. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course, but the overlay is a useful tool to add context to your SEO efforts. It may help you differentiate between changes you’ve made in your optimization and marketing efforts and changes Google has made to its algorithm.

What insights does this new data provide in your Moz Pro campaigns? Is it helpful to your SEO analytics efforts? We hope so! Either way, keep the great feedback coming — we love hearing from you.