Valantic’s Ryte Hacks for SEO Success

Our partner valantic, a top consulting agency in digital transformation, assists medium-sized and large companies in overcoming the primary challenges of digitalization by offering solutions with SAP and, of course, Ryte.

In this article, valantic's Senior SEO consultant, Nick, shares his Ryte hacks while consulting mid-sized and large companies on scaling SEO. It's your chance to explore the advanced world of SEO analytics and reporting and elevate your game with insights from one of the leading consulting agencies in digital transformation. Because, while few SEO experts love it, SEO reporting is an integral part of an SEO project and can greatly impact how managers and executives perceive your work. 

Let's start with Nick's Ryte Hacks for SEO analysis and reporting with keyword and page segments. With page and keyword segments, you can create segments based on URL structure or keyword logic. The possibilities are almost endless and in this article Nick will present you with a variety of use cases that will help you in particular with success monitoring and will certainly also apply to some of your needs.

Basic setup for a category or template level 

Create a segment per page template. For example category pages, product pages and brand pages. A basic, standard setup that is helpful for any website.

Monitor URL-migrations within your domain

When it comes to URL-migrations within a domain, Ryte is an exceptionally handy monitoring tool to monitor your URL changes. Incorporate the URL-logic of both the new and redirected URLs. You could specify this per template/page/type or category. Here is an example where we needed to migrate a segment to a new URL-structure, and we used Ryte to monitor this migration. 

In this case, we improved the crawling of brand pages substantially within a large website with crawl budget issues, so the permanent increase in indexed brand pages is a good sign.

Especially for big e-commerce websites, indexation can be a major SEO issue. 

This example is the same website as the migrated brand pages example. The client is a large B2B website with severe issues on a technical and site structure level, resulting in a website where about 90% of its products (they have around 250k) were not indexed when we started the project. In their B2B market, product EAN numbers and names are popular search intents, so “Indexed Pages” in this page segment report is an important KPI that we actively report to upper management.

Use page segments to monitor deindexation

Most of the time we want stuff indexed, but here is an example where a sharp increase in the indexation of irrelevant parameter URLs within a directory preceded an SEO drop in that category during a Google Update. We then implemented some fixes to de-index them and get them off Google’s crawl list and used Ryte to monitor how Google processed this.

Monitoring international SEO strategies

We all need to bring focus to our reporting, but this is especially the case for International clients. Most of the time, you only focus on a few key product segments in a few, or even one, key markets. If you’re focusing on a specific category but reporting on the country as a whole, or even an entire .com domain, your good results might not get the recognition they deserve. Therefore, proper segmentation on a country and focus segment level is key for basic monitoring of each market.

In addition to this, you can combine several key markets in one segment, and monitor specific product segments within a market.

Create focus in a big website, for example with “Low hanging fruits country X”

For a big international website with many different product types in many different countries, bringing focus to your SEO strategy is key. The website often doesn’t have the same level of competitiveness in every product type or in every market. We, therefore, spotted several “low-hanging fruits” for different countries (these low-hanging fruits weren’t the same in all markets). These were whole categories and parts of categories where we found that the client has a high chance of ranking with relatively low effort. We also added events, which you can see in the chart. Red means technical issues that occurred due to a website deployment, and green is the SEO fixes that we had implemented, proving SEO growth relatively short after our implementations.

Setup and monitor your ranking targets on a specific focus with Ranking Development

Simply import the keywords that you want to track and set a goal. Perfect for bringing focus and setting goals. In this example, we picked the top 50 keywords from an existing product segment and set the goal to rank on page 1 for 70% of those keywords. We could then report to upper management on how we progressed towards that goal. 

Strategise and monitor based on competitiveness

For a specific project (you can read the case here) there was a need to really differentiate between long-tail and short-tail keywords and analyze their trend development. We created a keyword segment for highly competitive short-tail queries and a keyword segment for less competitive long-tail queries. This is highly useful if you’re one of the SEO underdogs in a competitive market, or just getting started with SEO and want to keep track of your performance based on competitiveness. In this example, we implemented separate segments for the most important main category keywords (high volume, high competition) vs the more mid-tail and long-tail keywords (mid-to-low volume keywords with less competition). 

Create segments to monitor and analyze per season

If you have a webshop that sells multiple products for different seasons, you can use Rytes’ keyword and page segments to segment accordingly. Great examples are businesses in toys (indoor vs outdoor toys), leisure products (such as swimming pool products vs gear for indoor activities), and travel (winter destinations vs spring/summer destinations).

Example of a children's toy webshop where we created a segment with all categories that become popular during spring and summer.

Create segments to monitor and analyze per-price segments

Upper management thinks in terms of price segments, so why wouldn’t you report on this if it makes sense for your project? This client is active in the travel industry and offers packages that range from exclusive trips to Antarctica of over 40K per person to simple trips in Europe starting at 1.200€ per person. In such cases, it can be helpful to split reporting into price segments, for example, A+, B, and, C price categories. In this example, we can report to management that our A+ and B segments, which we put more focus on, perform much better than the C segment.

Analyze and monitor specific search intents

Drilling down on search intents can be based on both keyword segments, page segments, or a combination of both.

Here is an example of where we created a segment for various comparison intents and saw a quick growth of 550% clicks in just a few months, by increasing the amount of pages in this segment by 150%.

Besides measuring branded SEO performance, comparing this with the overall search market and your non-branded performance, you can also dive deeper. Track the impact of your branding campaigns, how well-established your brand is in a specific niche (branded searches + category keywords or URLs), or specific product launches.

Below is a screenshot of a segment for a specific white-label product one of our clients introduced several years ago, which is an important growth pillar for their business. During the holiday season in Q4, they focus heavily on this product. With Ryte they can measure that, even though their online market declined after COVID was done, we see a systematic increase in interest in their white label product. Especially the 2022 Q4 was great, surpassing both previous COVID periods.

Rytes’ “Underperforming Keywords” signals keywords that are underperforming (no surprise here). It creates a CTR curve based on your dataset and signals keywords that, based on that CTR curve, should have to perform better on their CTR.

There are several publicly available datasets with CTR curves, however, they are very generic. Actual CTRs vary depending on the country, search intent, and markets. To create a more accurate business case for a specific product category you’d like to optimize, you can create a non-branded CTR curve based on all your webshop pages(pages with commercial search intent). 

Data export for Google Sheets

Most tools, such as GSC itself, will apply filters on a “live” data set. When filtering this “live” data, data is lost in the process, so the filtered data is not always accurate. Because Ryte stores your data in Big Query and filters afterward, the dataset you export in Ryte is closer to 100% than other tools such as GSC itself and exporting tools like Supermetrics.

Final note

Keyword and Page segments are so flexible you can do almost anything with them. At first, it might be overwhelming because you don’t want to end up with an 80-page monthly report for your stakeholders. We hope this inspires you to play around a bit more and find exciting use cases that work for you and your stakeholders, whether that is your manager or your client. Additionally, share Ryte access with your non-SEO peers. Your brand manager might be very interested to see how your brand’s performance has developed in various fields.