PropertyGuru and its group companies empower property seekers with more than 3.3 million real estate listings, in-depth insights, and solutions that enable them to make confident property decisions across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Our strong organic growth is contributed by the efforts of the SEO team, leveraging solutions such as the Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) platform. 

The Challenge

As Southeast Asia’s leading property technology company, we are hyper-focused on serving our audience with actionable insights and content that helps them on their home ownership journey.

To ensure we are continuously creating value for our audience, we track a vast volume of keywords – around 20,000 per country, that are in line with what our consumers’ search/need to find their dream home. By tracking these keywords, we understand how they are served on the Google SERP and how consumers interact with the information. 

Our challenge was to track our performance, compare it to a range of other players in the sector and identify opportunities to grow our services and offerings, in line with our business objectives. 

How AWR helped us address the challenge

With AWR, we focused on these four features for insights:

1. Visibility – Keyword Groups & Metrics
2. Dashboards
3. SERP Features
4. Unlimited competitors

1. Visibility – Keyword Groups & Metrics

The visibility metrics displayed on all our keyword groups are a good tool to analyze the ranking positions on a weekly or monthly basis. This greatly benefits us as we have over 30+ keyword baskets, such as locations, and project names, amongst others. This monitoring helps us identify our site’s strongest or weakest pages (as most keywords are tied to our core product offerings or site pages).  

 Core metrics we focus on are: 

• Market share
• Top ranking keyword positions
• Keyword movements from the top 3 positions. 

Apart from helping us identify the set of pages or offerings which require our immediate attention, it also helps us quickly review if our keyword baskets were impacted by Google algorithm updates. 

When we notice keyword changes are happening across a keyword basket, we view the total search volume of the basket of keywords and determine the next steps accordingly. 

Based on the short-term (3 months) and long-term (6-8 months) performance, we plan the SEO experiments for each quarter.  

2. Dashboards

Besides reviewing the metrics, AWR allows us to build custom automated reports for deeper and better performance analysis without the need to filter settings each time. 

Our team can set up these custom reports to be shared weekly with our stakeholders to keep everyone updated on the health status of our keyword baskets, and benchmark it against our competitors. 

3. SERP Features

AWR helps us identify SERP features for a group of keywords, that in turn enables us to identify opportunities to create new products and serve relevant content in different formats. Our websites produce a variety of content such as search results, listing pages, and blog articles. AWR’s SERP feature allows us to identify the common SERP feature appearing for each keyword basket.

This insight enables us to understand how Google displays the results on the SERP and as a result, we can prioritize and optimize our content strategy to improve our CTR and brand awareness. 

4. Unlimited competitors

As Southeast Asia’s real estate leader we closely track  our organic share of voice. AWR enables us to track our competitors across countries, based on our business offerings, such as home mortgages, data tools, etc.  This ensures that during our regular competitive reviews, we select the right ones for performance comparison. 

Summary

Overall, the PropertyGuru SEO team believes in the insights and value AWR provides to help us improve our brand’s share of voice across the region. Additionally, the AWR customer support team (Bogdan) has been very prompt in resolving any queries or issues we faced. 

We can confidently say that having AWR as part of our SEO toolkit allows us to be ahead in the market.

Our SEO Team started working with Advanced Web Ranking only a few months ago. Yet, the in-depth data that we can got from it quickly proved its use.

The Challenge

Last year, we started looking into new ways to take our reporting to the next level. We were after a way to look past organic rankings of individual keywords. 

As our keyword sets were growing, it became clear that we needed to report on the performance of categories and sub-categories to figure out how each of them was performing across organic search and identify areas of improvement for our online business.

The Solution

At first, it wasn’t easy to decide on which ranking tool we wanted to bring in-house. We heard of AWR via the AWR CTR study and it was highly recommended in the SEO community. 

The keyword groups that we added in our AWR projects reflect the exact categories and sub-categories of products from our FGC websites. We have quite a few sub-categories under contact lenses, which are important to our business, such as daily contact lenses, toric contact lenses, coloured contact lenses, etc. 

All the keyword groups in Advanced Web Ranking are essential to our business, as they have commercial intent. This is why tracking the overall visibility across these keyword groups allows us to see how we are performing within each category/sub-category, so we can get an understanding of what type of commercial organic market share we occupy in terms of organic visibility.

There are four reporting areas that we focus on at the moment:

1. Visibility Metrics
2. Ranking Distribution
3. Market Share
4. SERP Feature

1. Visibility Metrics

The AWR visibility score and visibility percentage features allowed us to gain more insights into the overall organic performance of our keywords. We were able to track and compare our site’s organic visibility across core categories for contact lenses, solutions, and eye care and drill down into the organic data.

This was important because we managed to see how we performed for these categories in organic search compared to other competing sites.

This also helped identify the strongest categories in terms of organic visibility, and which ones potentially impacted the site’s total visibility.

2. Ranking Distribution

The ranking distribution data in AWR helped provide a breakdown of the keyword ranking performance, again by category level. Ranking Distribution data showed us how the site was performing for positions 1, 2-5, 6-10 etc, in different areas.

We originally struggled with this at FGC, when using a different rank tracking solution. The tool we used before AWR did provide ranking distribution data, but it was across all the keywords that were being tracked. It didn’t allow us to see the ranking distribution at a category level.

Advanced Web Ranking helped a lot to bridge that gap, and the position distribution is now one of FGC’s key aspects in reporting.

3. Market Share

We were also having trouble calculating the estimated organic market share that the site had overall and across each of its individual sub-categories. With AWR’s market share feature, my team and I understood our efforts compared to other sites in each of the different categories.

This is particularly insightful for our senior management too.

4. SERP Features 

As Google SERPs have transformed over the years to show more than just the standard top 10 blue links, it’s crucial that we track SERP features now, such as featured snippets (quick answers), people also ask, as well as image, maps, and video listings.

We’ve started using the AWR SERP feature to track how our content was performing for featured snippets (quick answers) and the people also ask in the SERPs across all keywords.

Featured snippets were a particular priority for us at FGC, seeing that for specific commercial/transactional queries Google preferred to show a featured snippet, which according to recent studies conducted by Ahrefs tends to take clicks away from the #1 ranking site.

One of the goals that we have now is to increase brand awareness in organic search, and occupying valuable featured snippets is the ideal way to achieve this.

The people also ask tracking feature helped us identify commonly asked questions by our customer base online. These insights have proved invaluable in improving the quality of our FAQ content over the last six months.

We managed to increase the FGC brand’s exposure for non-branded terms in organic search quite a bit. 

Some Final Thoughts

Since using Advanced Web Ranking, we have been pleasantly surprised with the data we have extracted from the tool and the fantastic customer support we have received.

With the new data insights, we created more in-depth SEO reports, which helped show the overall picture to senior-level management, and identify how strong or weak our content is in specific areas. Doing so enabled us to discover which categories required the most focus and attention.

This is the core value of Lifull Co., Japan’s largest real estate database. With tens of millions of users each month, the portal is strongly focused on high volume, quality and ease of housing and property searching.

Shin Okubo works with the SEO Strategy Division, mentoring a team of 20+ specialists.

We have been evaluating Advanced Web Ranking for some time, and started using the platform in 2019. Implementing Market Share was a key decision factor Our business values this figure, and the ability to show it in dashboards is very good for us.

Shin Okubo, SEO Strategy Division Lifull Co.

Currently, the team at Lifull works with multiple AWR accounts, monitoring location based ranking positions on a daily basis. The keywords are segmented in more than 100 groups, and performance is compared against 5 top competitors.

The Challenge

Running an SEO competitor analysis with AWR was already possible for static competitor sets, with the help of two visibility metrics: Click Share and Estimated Visits. When combined, these metrics provide an estimation of the traffic share driven by keywords ranking in Top 20.

Yet, getting a clear image is a bit more tricky when operating in a highly competitive industry, where the digital search landscape is so dynamic. There was still a question that Shin and the team could not resolve directly with AWR for their analysis:

How much are the Estimated Visits representing from the max possible traffic value?

During the discussions with Shin, we understood that finding the answer was very time consuming for the team. They had to export top sites and visibility data from AWR after every ranking update, and further run formulas in Excel in order to understand the competitor distribution and compute the actual share on the search market.

The Solution

With this pain point in mind, we thought of a way to automate the process, and came up with a new Visibility report in AWR:

Market Share looks at the Estimated visits that a domain or a URL gets from organic search, and it computes the percentage that it represents from the max possible value. In doing so, it takes into account all competitors from the SERPs, not just those which are actively monitored in the AWR project settings.

Once the implementation process was completed, we tested the new metric and competitor discovery algo together with Shin, and here’s what we found:

New competitors across the global keyword set

Shin and the team were tracking 5 competitor domains, all based in Japan. With the new development, we found a new competitor that was gaining a market share wider than two of those already monitored. In addition, this competitor’s market share trend showed a constant growth during the last month’s updates.

The team decided to add the new competitor to the AWR project in order to keep a closer eye on it in the future, find their best performing landing pages and further analyze the SERPs for it’s top keywords.

If you’re new to AWR, sign up for a free 30 day trial to check out the visibility reports live, with your own ranking data.

New and emerging competitors had a different distribution at keyword group level

Following the analysis on the competitor landscape across the entire set of keywords, we thought we should check what happens for specific keyword segments.

For this purpose, we looked at the 190 groups defined by Shin and made a selection for analysis by two criteria:

Performance

Here, we looked at search discoverability, so we selected the keyword groups that had the highest visibility percent, largest number of top 10 positions and largest number of impressions according to Google Search Console.

Then we looked at the incoming traffic, and selected the groups that had the largest number of clicks and highest CTR.

Search Intent

For this analysis, we looked at the keyword semantics and made the split by informational and commercial intent.

We ended up with a selection of 7 groups that we showed Shin during one of the discussions. The analysis that we presented included two types of data:

Aggregated

We showed the market share split on each group of interest, for both the existing and the new competitors discovered. On each group, the market share distribution was different among the known competitors. In addition, we pointed out two more competitor domains that were holding an important part of the total estimated traffic for those terms.

Granular

For each competitor, we could point directly to the exact landing pages that drove the highest market share, and to the specific keywords that helped them gain that share.

Some final thoughts

Based on the insights gained from the Market share analysis by keyword group, Shin and the team were able not just to measure the performance and find new competitors, but also to identify specific keywords that they could further target on the SEO flow.

What about you? It’d be interesting to learn how you discover new competitors and run comparative analyses!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

Production Manager Michelle Neuhoff Boyd and her team help thousands of customers grow their online visibility in various industries, including automotive, law, surgery and more.

We were originally introduced to AWR in 2010 by another expert in the industry. At the time, it was one of the few services that provided Google Maps rankings, and that was a key metric we needed to track success for our clients.

Michelle Neuhoff Boyd, Production Manager Search Influence

Soon after the release of our web based platform, Search Influence decided to switch versions and moved customer profiles from AWR Desktop to the cloud.

The Challenge

The team at Search Influence had already built a proprietary client SEO reporting dashboard. This meant the rank tracker they would work with needed to provide solutions for three main requirements:

1. In-depth local rank tracking
2. API access
3. Multiple seats

The Solution

In-depth local rank tracking

AWR provides us with multiple search engine & international location options that allow us to cater our results to some of our more niche clients no matter their location or their customer’s location.

Most of the customers that the team manages with AWR target Google US with custom locations, for both desktop and mobile searches. The focus is on growing the visibility in organic and local results from the web search.

However, Michelle’s team also manages customers with special local tracking requirements, like universal and maps results for Google My Business profiles.

Here’s a quick overview of all search preferences that can be used for customizing a Google engine in AWR:

API access

We’re really lucky that we’ve had some clients who have been with us since 2010. The API access to rank data allows us to continue to use our proprietary client reporting dashboard.

AWR and Search Influence teamed up in an effort to make Google search definitions available via the API. The implementation process started with the static search engines, where items are added to AWR projects based on the awr_id of each targeted engine.

Next, we focused on dynamic search engines offering the possibility to create custom locations and choose a specific type of results for the search engine being added via the API.

Multiple seats

We had some concerns about finding a cost effective solution that would offer multiple seats. But we ultimately decided that the cloud version of AWR was worth it due to the additional tools and visibility that a cloud-based system offers – specifically, each member of the team easily being able to login and access the data in any way they needed.

In addition to automatically pulling data via API, the team at Search influence also works directly with the AWR user interface. Currently, there are just over 20 user profiles defined, with different levels of permissions.

The user management system is optimized for dynamic SEO teams, allowing unlimited profiles being created under one subscription, at no additional cost.

Some final thoughts

Currently, Search Influence is smoothly running local SEO ranking reports for 3,000+ customer projects with AWR. The team is able to streamline the overall data retrieval process with the help of the API integration, while also performing individual data checks on-demand directly in on the platform.

Working with Michelle’s team was a great experience for us since we got to meet people from different departments, with different support requirements.

This experience taught us a valuable lesson: throughout the entire process there was one contact person from AWR’s side, in charge of communication with all team members. This was key to quickly gaining a good understanding of the overall business needs at Search Influence.

Rank tracking for us is an important metric for measuring the success of our (technical) SEO changes/implementations. With the day-by-day / week-by-week comparisons we can discover the impact of several changes made on our websites and how this contributes in increasing organic rankings. In times where search engines are changing their algorithms every day, it’s important to understand how and when this affects our rankings, so we can react on it.

Floris Gouw, SEO Coordinator Thomas Cook BE

Established in 1841 with the dream of one man, Thomas Cook has grown into one of the world’s most successful agencies for international travel. The in-house SEO team has been working for more than 4 years with AWR as the main partner for keyword monitoring in Belgium, tracking rankings for different search engines on multiple devices and languages.

Raising a red flag

It all started when Floris’ team noticed inaccurate ranking positions for their neckermann.be domain.

They contacted our customer care team and sent us a report which showed the domain had ranked in the top 5 positions for several days in a row, but suddenly dropped out of top 50 on the next day. Just one day later, it went back up in top 5. The shifts in positions were too sudden and too extreme. It was uncanny, considering that they’d made no changes for those keywords.

One of AWR’s core values lies in the accuracy of the data we provide, so we immediately set out to make an in-depth analysis on the support case that Floris reported. Together with our Search Engine engineers, we started looking at the SERP files that had been retrieved for the neckermann.be project.

24 hours later, the results from the SERP analysis were ready. All the data had been gathered with the correct search definition, which meant that the cause for this behavior was external to AWR.

Yet, we felt like an “it’s not us” approach would not be too helpful for Floris and the team. We continued the investigation at a granular level, trying to look at some of the problematic SERPs from an SEO perspective.

This is how we noticed that on the specific dates when neckermann.be dropped from top 50 rankings, Google was listing URLs from thomascook.be. These pages had almost similar content with their competitor pages from neckermann.be.

Understanding the problem

Once we reported these findings to the Thomas Cook team, they confirmed that the two sites belong to the BE Business Unit, and the offer for Belgium differs slightly between them. It was becoming clear that the major ranking fluctuations were the result of duplicate content on two separate domains.

Neckermann is part of Thomas Cook, and in Belgium both websites have the same offer (but Thomas Cook has extras). The content on some pages is exactly the same, and we’re struggling with this. The thing we see now is that Google is showing one week the neckermann URL, and the next week the thomascook URL.

Floris Gouw, SEO Coordinator Thomas Cook BE

At that point, Floris and his team started to investigate how many hotel pages were cases of duplicate content so they could decide how to approach the issue.

They needed to pinpoint the actual ranking URLs that had duplicate content and causing Google to be unsure of which ones to rank. The team used AWR’s exports to CSV and sorted the data by ranking URL.

Choosing the solution

Now that the stretch of the problem was clear, it was time to think about the fix.

One of the solutions they had was to develop unique content for all hotel pages on both websites, which was more demanding from a human resources point of view.

The second was to make sure the hotel offer pages on one of the websites were not indexed, thus de-indexing the pages in question.

Though full implementation required some time, they set out to work, thus building a strategy with long-term goals in mind. The results would be immediate and solved the duplication issue in line with Google’s best practices.

Measuring the impact

After the change was rolled out on the domains, Floris turned to AWR for monitoring the effects.

Again, the CSV exports proved their utility, showing the actual ranking URLs for each keyword together with the current ranking position, and the change in comparison with the previous ranking data updates.

In a few weeks, the high fluctuations on the problematic keywords stopped. The individual pages from each domain started to rank independently, and the search visibility trends returned to normal.

Some final words

While AWR isn’t an auditing tool, the ranking data it provides can offer a lot of clues about the health of an SEO strategy. In this case, having multiple projects for different domains on the same AWR account led to the discovery of duplicate content which influenced rankings for both domains.

It’s just like Floris said:

Ranking Tools like AWR aren’t just for ranking, but also for showing us the technical SEO issues we’re dealing with :).

What about you?

Have you ever dealt with duplicate content problems cross domains? It’d be interesting to learn how you discovered and resolved them!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section

With an international team of more than 40 specialists, this fast-growing agency has been delivering digital solutions for regional and global brands for over six years.

The team at Red Blue Blur Ideas take a data-driven approach to SEO, using insights to drive the search marketing performance of their clients. An endeavor like this can only be possible if they are able to gain a deep understanding of how their clients’ digital assets rank in search engine results and how visible they are in relation to competitors.

Back in 2014, RBBi chose Advanced Web Ranking as their rank tracker, for international keyword tracking and SERP analysis requirements, initially tracking over 50,000 keywords weekly across a variety of search engines and languages.

The Challenge: Covering Big SERP data on the Middle Eastern search markets

As part of an agency that’s truly built on data and relies on hard numbers to provide insights and solutions for their customers, AWR has been able to give us the full picture on rank tracking across our 30+ SEO accounts including some major international and regional brands.

We at RBBi have been using the AWR platform since 2014, and are extremely impressed at the depth, reach, and level of attention provided by the tool.

Andrew Tonks, MD Performance & Analytics, Red Blue Blur Ideas

One of the major pain points that RBBi wanted to overcome was to measure search visibility as accurately as possible and at a cost-effective price, across different languages and different markets.

However, the language wasn’t just a requirement for keywords, but was also needed for the search engine interface.

The Process: Reaching out for help to overcome pain points

AWR was already able to ensure support for monitoring keywords with special characters, including Arabic languages. However, most of our search engines for the Middle Eastern market had only one interface language option.

RBBi reached out to our customer care team and through the meetings that followed, we worked together to map the requirements needed to provide in-depth competitive insights from the SERPs, with features specifically tailored for the region.

In consequence, AWR’s search engine technicians added support for English language interface on several search markets from the Middle East including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

The Result: Pioneering stats measurement with pinpoint accuracy for search in the region

Following the addition of the new search engine language option, RBBi could monitor keywords on sub-markets with multiple languages. This way, the team gained a deeper and more comprehensive perspective on the search visibility of their clients across their multilingual audience.

One of the ranking views that AWR offers in the Rankings menu – Search Engine Comparison – can be especially helpful for this purpose, as it provides side-by-side comparisons of visibility and individual keyword positions across multiple search engines.

Other benefits:

1. Multiple levels of reporting
The team at RBBi uses two types of data reporting that are available in AWR:

• aggregated data (with metrics like Visibility or Average rank) – these show the overall trend of the website visibility across the keywords and search engines monitored;
• granular data – with individual keyword positions and the possibility to analyze the performance of different landing pages that ranked in time for each term.

2. Exploring the actual SERPs
As search results pages are in constant evolution in content, type, and form, RBBi periodically runs testing campaigns that target Google or international search engines like Yandex and Baidu to test every new change and stay on top of trends in the industry.

The purpose is to see how the client’s and competitor’s pages are listed for brand or product terms, and to evaluate how the results change following any updates in the SERPs or on the pages themselves.

Conclusion: Dynamic insights that make a real difference

The world of search is in constant evolution with frequent algorithm updates and changes, making rank-tracking an ever-evolving process as well, constantly adapting to the changing parameters.

Efficient SEOs are always ready to tailor their work and practices to their clients’ needs in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment, and AWR does its best to keep up with their needs.

By adding a new search engine language option to AWR’s interface, RBBi could pioneer the ability to provide top keyword insights on markets in the region for their clients.

Many other AWR users also benefit from this improvement, which is why we at Advanced Web Ranking are open to users’ suggestions and try to maintain a continuous feedback loop that improves our product and makes their work better and easier.

Over at iProspect Canada, Julien Beaulieu and his team deliver a professional marketing service with the help of in-depth SEO data which focuses on rankings, analytics, and links. For every new project they start, they need to track thousands of keywords, and get accurate rankings promptly.

In 2015, iProspect Canada turned to AWR Cloud for rankings accuracy and comprehensive user management. The team was already working with AWR Desktop “due to its reliability and ease of use“.

The Challenge: Smooth platform transition

We were long time customers of AWR’s desktop version. In time, our needs evolved and we needed to move over to a more efficient and functionally robust platform that also made it easy to share rankings with clients. AWR Cloud met our quality demands.

JULIEN BEAULIEU, Earned Media Team Lead iProspect Canada

The team was accustomed with the functionalities and graphic user interface of the desktop version of AWR. In addition, they needed to verify the precision of their ranking data. This meant controlling which geolocated proxy sends which keyword query. Could this be delivered by a cloud platform?

The Process: Meeting the people

It was clear to us that before helping the iProspect Canada team migrate to AWR Cloud, we first needed to understand their current workflow.

We set up a meeting with the team to discuss their concerns. We found that the main holdbacks were the accuracy of data and the learning curve. A new GUI, as friendly as it is, can sometimes hamper the team from getting on with daily tasks.

To answer these questions, we organized a custom demo for iProspect and got the chance to showcase AWR Cloud and discuss one on one with the people who would actually use the new UI. It was an interesting Q&A experience on both sides.

Following the meeting, we set up an extended trial so everyone could have the time to get to know the new interface, and test the accuracy with manual search results from location. The back and forth discussions continued throughout the pre-sale support period, until the team was accommodated with the new platform.

The Result: From Desktop to Saas

Switching to the AWR Cloud platform made rank tracking and reporting a lot easier for the iProspect team.

In addition, costs from multiple desktop licenses and third-party proxies were cut, and the people in charge of monitoring the data updates via proxies had more time to focus on other SEO tasks now.

Other benefits of transition:

1. Rankings availability

As a web based tool, all data is stored online now, and is available for the SEO team and the clients at any time, and from any location. One of the biggest advantages about tracking rankings with AWR is that it runs on top of proxies. The accuracy of the data it provides is made possible with the help of geolocated proxy servers.

2. Data sharing options

There are several ways data can be shared:

• Creating users with read only permissions for team members and for clients, at no additional cost. Users can login in their accounts and see data online whenever they need.
• Sending the clients a unique link where data is refreshed automatically.
• Sharing HTML or PDF reports that the clients can access online without the need to log in.

3. Google integration

AWR Cloud integrates Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools data, as well as Adwords statistics.

Overall it was a great experience for us working closely with the team at iProspect Canada. We learned more about our customers’ needs and, more importantly, we were able to help them make a smooth transition from AWR Desktop to AWR Cloud.

The team is now able to take a much more streamlined approach to their SEO strategies, share their reports and search results in a timely manner, and easily communicate them with their clients.