To help you identify unexpected changes in key metrics between crawls, the Lumar platform includes a number of changed metrics reports for Technical SEO projects. These reports allow you to track and report changes in critical web metrics over time to quickly identify and respond to shifts in your site’s performance and structure. This feature is particularly useful for maintaining Technical SEO health, ensuring content consistency, and tracking the impact of updates or changes to the site. It can also be useful for monitoring the impact of releases on page size, to alert when metadata fields or canonicals fall off or change.
What issues does this address?
With new code being published on a regular basis it can be easy for issues to be introduced and go unnoticed, which can impact the health of your site—reversing prior optimizations and creating needless cycles of work. While this information is available in existing reports in Lumar, identifying how these metrics change from crawl to crawl can take some time—potentially requiring downloading of data from two crawls to compare in a spreadsheet.
How does it help?
The Changed Metrics report helps by reducing the time it takes to get this information, and avoiding the need to download data to compare. Currently, Lumar contains the following changed metrics reports:
- Availability:
- Pages with Changed Status Code
- Indexability > Canonicalization:
- Pages with Changed Canonical URLs
- Discoverability:
- Pages with Changed Level (in the Internal Linking subcategory)
- Pages with Changed Redirected to URLs (in the Redirections subcategory)
- Pages with Changed Hreflang Combinations (in the Internationalization subcategory)
- Rankability > Page Content:
- Pages with Changed Title
- Pages with Changed Description
- Pages with Changed H1 Tags
For each report, you’ll see a trend chart showing the difference over time, and in the report table you’ll see the current value, with the value from the previous crawl struck out. The URL details view will also display any changes.
NOTE: To protect against false positive changes caused by status codes like 3xx, 4xx and 5xx being reported, the Changed Title, Description and H1 reports will only populate if URLs received a 200 status code in the recent crawl and the one it’s being compared to. Similarly, the Changed Levels report will only populate if URLs have a level within the crawl and the one it’s being compared to, to avoid orphaned URLs being included within the data.
As well as the dedicated reports mentioned above, you can also see changes between crawls for a number of other metrics using the Resource Detail view. From any of the reports in Example, you can access the Resource Detail View by clicking on a URL in the report table. You can then choose Changed Metrics in the left-hand navigation to see metrics that have changed from the most recent and previous crawl. You can also compare with older crawls if required.
What benefits does it bring?
The changed metrics reports help you easily track changes in critical metrics over time. This means that you can spot spikes in issues, and address them quickly before they cause any loss in traffic.
You’ll also be able to quickly confirm planned changes (e.g. templated page title changes), new hreflang combinations or check that newly migrated URLs are redirecting to the correct destination.
Segments are also fully compatible with the Changed Metrics reports, helping you to easily spot trends within the changes reported.
If you have Lumar Monitor as part of your subscription, you can also set alerts on these reports, so you’ll be notified as soon as an issue is identified. You can also set up a dashboard to see these key metrics across all your domains, geographies or important site sections in one place.
Ready to get started?
If you have our SEO metrics in your subscription, you can access these reports now. Either go to the All Reports section of the overview and search for ‘changed’, or access the reports in the categories and subcategories listed above.
If you’re not a Lumar customer right now, get in touch and we’ll be happy to show you our platform.
