AlertPanel: Be Alerted to Critical SEO Issues Before It’s Too Late

At Botify, we’re intimately familiar with the idea of SEO horror stories, not only because they’re a regular challenge for many of our clients, but also because many of us have worked in SEO and experienced them ourselves. What makes those horror stories unique – not to mention so stressful, is that even though they’re often based on the same tactics and principles you deal with every day, they feel different because they mean something isn’t just unoptimized — it’s broken.

Optimizing something is exciting and full of possibility. It’s about getting a win! Fixing something broken is different; it’s an indication that your website is not performing the way it was expected to.

In short, disasters aren’t fun. And while Botify has all the data you need to prevent them, the platform has historically been focused on helping you identify those aforementioned opportunities; not necessarily on preventing disasters where time is the critical factor.

Why Early Warning Matters for SEO

The Botify Intelligence suite is designed to process the incredible amount of data in Botify’s unified data model and turn it into the insights you need to know and the actions you need to do. For example, ActionBoard finds, prioritizes, and explains various optimization opportunities that exist on your site so you don’t have to root through data in Botify Analytics to identify what you can improve – and what to do first.

AlertPanel is the newest addition to the Intelligence suite and is designed for the other kind of analysis — problem detection. After all, while SEOs would like to spend all of their time working on new optimizations, the fact is that things break. When they do, the consequences can be devastating.

In SEO, when something does go wrong, the damage is often hard to detect. Problems can linger for days or weeks, and may not become noticeable until your site is re-indexed, search results change, and traffic starts to drop. In our recent AlertPanel-focused webinar, we talked about the SEO problem solving process and how it looked a little something like the visualization below.

Essentially, the longer a problem exists, the greater the damage — especially once your now-broken site changes get indexed by search engines. But problem-solving always takes time, and there isn’t always a magic bullet for rapidly making fixes. That’s why it’s so important to discover problems as early as possible, fix them before they do much damage, and in an ideal scenario, any at all.

AlertPanel: Botify’s Early Warning System for SEO

Based on this thinking, we’ve designed AlertPanel to help it tackle three main goals of any serious SEO early warning system.

1) Timeliness

Remember, the goal is reduce the time between something going wrong on your site and when you learn about it. Alerts need to come quickly, without overwhelming you or your infrastructure. Botify runs a separate, higher-frequency crawl on only your most important URLs to ensure that you get information (and any resulting alerts) quicker than you would by looking at normal crawl data, while also avoiding a flood of unimportant alerts. That brings us to…

2) Relevance

The whole point of alerting is to tell you things that matter. AlertPanel’s focus on your most strategic site content certainly helps with that, but it’s not the only thing we’ve done to provide you with the most relevant alerts. For starters, the alert categories that this system includes have logical, pre-set thresholds based on both our experience with customers and our own internal SEO expertise.

The platform also supports “muting” of certain alerts, in the event that something isn’t useful or the alert is a warning for something that you’re already aware of and (let’s be honest) simply aren’t going to fix anytime soon. Additional alert customizations will be coming soon!

3) Accessibility

The last critical aspect of early warning is somewhat unique to SEO: making sure alerts go out to everyone who needs to see them. When it comes to website issues, stakeholders can include everyone from business teams to product groups to developers. And with flexible notifications – inside the application, via email, or even into a Slack channel with our dedicated integration – you can rest easy knowing that everyone who needs to know about a problem is going to see it immediately.

Alert Categories

We’ve got big plans for AlertPanel, but right off the bat it offers automated monitoring many of the SEO challenges most likely to sneak under the radar, including:

• Server errors
• Drops in crawling
• Drops in organic visits
• Index coverage issues
• Bad canonicals
• Slow pages
• Missing or altered Robots.txt files

While this set of alerts covers a wide variety of potential problems, our long-term goal is to make AlertPanel the ultimate early warning system for your site. Expect custom alerts and expanded use of all of the data we have about your website – from crawl and log data to keyword and conversion information – to give you the ultimate, most accurate SEO security and risk mitigation solution.

SEO Alerting is Now Available in Botify Pro!

We’ve built AlertPanel into the Botify Pro plan because we’ve learned from our customers with mission-critical web properties that they can’t afford to miss anything that could adversely impact their organic search performance. So whether you’re new to Botify or an existing Botify customer, let us know you’re interested in taking advantage of the many benefits of Botify Pro.