2022 has been a defining year in the world of SEO and digital marketing…and Lumar! With growing economic uncertainty, it’s never been more important for businesses to embrace organic search, as marketing teams seek innovative ways to optimize performance despite tightening purse strings.
As a result, the industry has had to evolve, and with it, the roles and responsibilities an SEO is expected to perform. A technically sound SEO strategy may get you the visibility and traffic you’re after, but your overall website health and user experience is becoming one of the biggest differences between securing the sale, or losing out to the competition – (even a one-second delay in mobile load times can reduce conversion rates by up to 20%).
This has meant we’ve needed to evolve too. We needed to find a way to continue to deliver the same market-leading crawl capabilities, alongside some powerful new features designed to help technical SEOs, engineers and digital leaders, embrace the growing demand for greater website intelligence and unite under a single source of truth.
With that in mind, let’s take a look back at everything we achieved this year.
1. We Became Lumar
Perhaps the biggest change for us came in September when we waved a fond farewell to our former brand identity, Deepcrawl, and introduced the world to Lumar!
With the demands on SEOs changing, we needed to refocus our mission. Lumar is all about enabling businesses to see their websites’ technical health in a new light — with a focus on providing brands with a full-suite of website intelligence tools designed to easily identify and implement the website changes that will have the biggest impact on digital-driven growth.
The rebrand was a huge success and it was fantastic to be able to unveil it in-person at BrightonSEO.
2. We Had a Makeover
Alongside the name change, came a fresh new look and feel. The era of lilac is upon us, with our amazing marketing team working around the clock alongside the awesome branding experts at Verve, to bring Lumar to life in a fresh and relevant way that encapsulates what our new brand is all about.
In our new visual identity, you’ll notice an emphasis on light, lenses, and viewports that reflect the many Lumar features that help bring your website’s technical foundations to light.
Read more about our rebrand and what our evolution to Lumar means for the industry, here.
3. We Launched Our Enhanced Crawler
To be able to achieve everything we want to as Lumar, it was time to supercharge our own industry-leading crawler.
So, in September, we began rolling out our enhanced crawler. These major improvements make our crawler the fastest on the market, capable of achieving speeds of 450 URLs per second for unrendered crawls and 350 URLs per second for rendered crawls.
Alongside the market-leading crawl speeds, the enhanced crawler takes full advantage of Google’s own rendering and parsing engine, meaning our crawler is more closely aligned and optimized for Google’s own behaviors. New data improvements also reflect Google’s best practices and allow users even greater insights, including:
- Improved metrics due to word_count and content_size being calculated from body only.
- Cleaned up whitespace in anchor text to remove the risk of unique links caused by whitespace differences.
- The calculation of meta_title_length_px metrics has been improved. You may see slightly higher values for this metric and may see an increase in Max Title Length Report.
Read more about our enhanced crawler, here.
4. Say Hello to Monitor
We’re always looking for new ways to help digital marketers do their job more effectively and efficiently…especially at scale. Which is why in May of 2022, we launched Monitor!
Monitor is the ideal way for multi-domain brands, SEO agencies and large scale websites to easily detect changes and trends that impact site performance, and identify where to focus their attention with smart alerts designed to capture issues before they escalate.
Pre-built dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of how your content, performance, site maps and technical health are faring, with trend lines and health scores helping you to spot issues faster and prioritize more effectively.
For a deeper dive into Monitor and how it can help you keep tabs on your website’s technical health, check out our in-depth guide, here.
5. And Say Another Big Hello to Impact
SEO is no longer solely the arena of the digital marketers and engineers. With organic search performance becoming ever more essential for businesses seeking to drive brand awareness and conversions while maintaining effective customer acquisition costs (CAC) – having your leadership team be able to understand the impact that SEO can have on the bottom line is crucial.
So, how do you make sure you get your seat at the table? Your fair share of next year’s marketing budget? Your recognition for the hard yards you and your team put in in the dark depths of your website’s code?
Step forward Impact! Lumar’s solution to this increasingly common problem. Giving you all the tools needed to create an easy-to-understand view of your site’s technical health and effectively communicate progress and impact in a way your stakeholders will understand, and get buy-in for improvements and future projects.
6. Health Scores
As part of Impact, a host of new capabilities were introduced to the Lumar platform. The first of which is Health Scores.
Health Scores rate your website’s technical health out of 100 for specific areas such as Indexability, Discoverability, Rankability, etc. helping you identify key areas for investigation to drive improvements and increase conversions.
In addition to the individual area scores, also give your site an overall health score, so you can easily see at a top level how your website is performing. Pretty handy, right?
Read more about Health Scores, here.
7. Industry Benchmarking
Alongside the Health Scores, you can also see how your site compares to competitors in your industry with our Benchmarking functionality. These are industry averages tied to each area of your health score, allowing you to see whether you’re over or under performing against your direct competition.
How do we calculate these industry benchmarks, I hear you ask?
We combine monthly crawls, our own industry expertise and representative industry-specific data to generate unique benchmarks across a host of industries, including:
- Communications
- E-commerce
- Fashion & Apparel
- Financial Services
- Manufacturing
- Publishing
- SaaS
- Technology
Read more about Benchmarking and how to add it to your current Lumar package, here.
8. Traffic Funnel
The final piece of the Impact puzzle is the Traffic Funnel. Similar to the sales funnel, we have divided the various stages that your web pages go through and rated each of your URLs based on how it fares at any given stage.
At the top end of the funnel, we look at the ability for search engines to find, index and present your pages to Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). At the bottom end, we look at the effectiveness of pages appearing in SERP to drive visits and conversions. More importantly, it shows how many pages are dropping out of the funnel at each stage, and therefore unlikely to be driving conversions.
Here’s a breakdown of what the Traffic Funnel looks like:
- Availability – How many of your pages are available to search engines?
- Indexability – Can search engines index your pages?
- Uniqueness – How much of your content is not duplicated elsewhere on your site?
- Discoverability – How many of your pages are in Google’s search engine results pages?
- Rankability – Of the pages appearing in SERP, how many are actually driving visits?
- Experience – How many of your traffic-driving delivering a great user experience, and therefore likely to convert?
9. We Launched Our Very First Slack Community – Human First Digital
With #deathoftwitter trending online, tech SEOs went in search of a new safehaven to share ideas and connect with one another. So we launched Human First Digital – a new slack community designed to bring together the best and brightest names in SEO, alongside tech SEOs of all abilities, in a safe space to learn, engage and collaborate.
It’s an awesome place to pick up some tips, try to decipher the latest Google updates together and just hang out with likeminded people. You’ll also see some friendly Lumar faces from our expert Pro Services team there, on hand to answer your questions and chat about all things SEO.
You can join the Human First Digital community here – and don’t forget to spread the word!
10. We Were Award Winners!
We started off 2022 strong by finishing 5th in BusinessCloud’s MarTech 50 ranking. Celebrating the “UK’s most innovative startups, scaleups and established firms creating original technology for marketing”, we were chosen by an independent judging panel alongside a vote from 1,500 of their readers as one of the most forward-thinking and pioneering solutions on the market.
We wanted to say a huge thank you to all of the Lumar community who voted for us. Innovation continues to be the driving force behind everything we do, and as website health becomes more of a business-wide priority, we’re thrilled to be at the forefront when it comes to creating pioneering platforms for website intelligence.
11. We Partnered with Tons of Awesome People to Spread the SEO Love
Whether it was on one of our industry-renowned webinars, Jamie Indigo’s awesome interview series (hot off the press from BrightonSEO), or for one of our many Ebooks, we partnered with some of the biggest names in SEO to bring you some A-grade content in 2022.
No matter if you’re new to SEO or a seasoned professional, we believe everybody deserves to get access to the same amazing resources to learn and improve their skill set – and what better way than to learn from one another.
We have tons of cool stuff lined up in 2023, so stay tuned to our blog to find out more.
12. We Gave Back!
‘Tis the season of giving, but at Lumar we pride ourselves on honoring that generous spirit year round. Our Lumar team is made up of some pretty awesome people who dedicate themselves to bettering the lives of others – whether that’s by divulging insider SEO tips on Twitter, or using their charity days to support some amazing causes around the world.
Wherever we could, we also played our small part in making the world a slightly better place! At BrightonSEO, our coffee cup initiative helped raise money and awareness for three charities very close to our hearts: Girls Who Code, The Trevor Project and One Tree Planted. And speaking of One Tree Planted, any time one of our lovely clients left us a G2 review, we planted ten more trees!
What Does 2023 Have in Store for Lumar?
So, there you have it! 2022 has been a busy year for us here at Lumar HQ – but we’re tremendously proud of all of the hard work that our team has put in to bring you some amazing new tools and resources that’ll help you on your SEO journey.
With organic search set to play an even more crucial role in the marketing mix for many businesses in 2023, we’ll be right along for the ride, with exciting features, improved functionality and greater insights into how to optimize your website intelligence throughout the year.
Watch this space!
