Search Analytics Blog

Enquisite Passsive Search Engine Ranking Reports

2 Responses since August 1st, 2006

Enquisite started as a means to report on a web site’s position within the serps (search engine results page).  It became a lot more - but still has that very positive feature.  It’s still a search engine ranking report, except unlike any other one out there, it complies with the search engines’ Terms of Use:  We don’t actively query the search engines to determine your web site’s rank / position.  We figured out a way (and filed the patents) to gather that information passively.

You’ll notice everywhere in the reports a series of columns beside every entry:  H / L / A / K / # / %  Here’s what they mean:

H - The highest page your site was found on in the search engines.  Basically, this usually is 1 - for page 1.  It means that someone, somewhere entered a query into a search engine, saw your site’s listing on page 1 of the search engine results page (SERP), clicked the link, and arrived at your site. 

L - The lowest page your site was found on in the search engines for the query. (or territory etc…). I’ve seen page 100 !  It means someone, somewhere a query into a search engine, saw your site’s listing on page X 100 of the results page, clicked the link, and arrived at your site.  Within a day of starting the prototype testing phase I saw a listing page of 63.  I thought we had a error.  We didn’t.  Someone using Google Romania entered in a query which contained a word that appeared in both English and Romanian.  They kept going through the SERPs until they found a listing in English.

A - It’s the average.  A lot of times it’ll read 1.4 or 1.2, 1.6 etc.  I look at that at top 14, top 12, top 16.

K - This is a biggie - The last time someone arrived at your web site from a search engine, it was from page #K.  It’s really useful for tracking particular queries.

# - The number of queries / entries.

% - The percentage that represents.

I’ll let users explore more and more of the features - the tool is designed so that you can look at data three dimensionally - you can’t do that with any other analytics or metrics tool.  But you need to.  Our users demanded it.

My favorite tool is the search engine comparison tool.  For almost every site, Google, MSN and Yahoo! are the 3 top engines.  Now, you can easily compare the way they send differing traffic to your site.  This data is useful for PPC buys - easily see which terms are driving traffic from one engine but not another.  It’s also useful for organic SEO work - you’ll be able to discover which factors are being weighted / used in on-page optimization by the different engines.  (yes, I know that black hats will love this too). 

We’ll be adding more features to this tool, like omission reporting - find out which terms are arriving from other engines, but not Google / Yahoo / MSN…  knowing what’s not there is as important, or more important than knowing what is there.  We’ll also be making the comparison tool available with constraints.  Compare just Google traffic from 3 cities, or MSN / Google / ASK from just Nebraska, etc… 

 There’s lots to come.  We’ll be posting the development lists in the next few weeks - we want your feedback, and requests to help us build out the reports you want.