Written by María Santoja
Last Friday, March 4th, part of Human Level‘s Search department was selected to attend a meeting of professionals organized by the Sistrix tool in Madrid. Juan González, head of Sistrix for Spain and UK, gathered around forty SEO professionals to explain the main new features of the tool. In addition, we were able to discuss real cases and examine them with Sistrix, which led to an interesting discussion not only about the tool, but also about the factors behind the changes in the visibility of the analyzed portals.
The 3 SEO actors: Google, our site and the competition
Juan explained that in order to perform a correct data analysis, we must understand the context of the data. To do so, he defined the three main actors involved in the changes in positioning, which are Google, our website and our competitors. When faced with a variation in the performance index, we must ask ourselves which of these three actors is responsible.
To illustrate this, John used a very useful metaphor:
“Google is like a supermarket, for example Carrefour. Carrefour will want its customers to be satisfied and go to its supermarkets, so it will offer them the products in the order it thinks will satisfy them the most. The order of the products will depend on the customers’ interest in one brand or another. However, it will also be influenced by what the brands do: for example, if Leche Pascual suddenly disappears from the market, other milk brands will have to take its place on the shelves.”
Based on this a change in the visibility index of a website can be the result of:
- A change in Google’s algorithm.
- A change in our competitors.
- Users are not satisfied with our brand or our product (loss of interest in what we offer).
- A change in our website (redesign, removal of content, change to HTTPS…).
In addition, it was pointed out that the increase in the number of Internet users is often not taken into consideration, so although a portal may be receiving more traffic than in the past, this does not necessarily mean that it is doing things right. Traffic may increase due to the growth of Internet users, and not as a result of a good strategy. The rise would have to be much more prominent for success to be real.
The time range that Juan gave us to detect trends in the visibility graphs was also very useful:
- Short trend: up to four weeks
- Average trend from 4 weeks to 12 months
- Long trend: more than 12 months
Discovering the potential of Sistrix
During the presentation the attendees had the opportunity to solve doubts about the different functionalities of Sistrix, as well as to write our letter to the wise men proposing improvements for future updates.
One of the modules that we explored the most, as it was perhaps the most unknown among professionals, was the Links module. The main difference between Sistrix link processing and other tools is that Sistrix does not crawl links from portals with low visibility indexes, as it knows that these are irrelevant to Google.
We highlight one of its most original features:
- Linksplus: if we activate this option, we will have saved a history of links from this moment on.
- Link evolution: this module has an option in which you can incorporate a link to track it (for example, a link that you have paid for and you want to check that it is really as you have contracted it). The tool will send a crawler every minute to check that the link is in the same place, and if it detects changes it notifies you by email.
- Links to other toolsWhen you create a new Links project you can load links offered by other tools such as Ahrefs, Majestic, Opensite Explorer or your own Google Search Console. You can also upload your Disavow file to disregard those links, and synchronize with Google Analytics to take into account links that bring referral traffic.
Finally we took a look at Amazon’s new Keyword Analysis tool, still in beta, which looks really good.
It is very grateful that Sistrix carries out this type of initiative in which it gives us live technical support and updates us on its tool so that we can get the most out of it. It is always a pleasure to meet other professionals in the sector, many of whom are already old acquaintances, and to exchange experiences. These events are a must-attend event where you always learn something new, so it was a real pleasure to attend.
