We get lots of questions about our B2B marketing ranker app and the top 100 charts the app allows us to produce. Some people love it, others, not so much. It’s like it’s just not OK to take public information freely available on the internet then make it all simple and understandable for the average B2B marketing person.
We’d like to set a few things straight.
What’s it all about?
We’re a B2B marketing business that thinks absolutely everything marketers do should be evidence-based. We’re quite geeky, so we’ve worked out how to aggregate the scores provided by the most trusted web analytics tools available online today. We interpret the combined score to create the Now|Comms ranking.
Thanks to Ben and our team of phenomenally creative coders, the Now|Comms ranking pulls in data from three legendary industry sources (Google, MOZ and SEMrush) to track the five most important metrics present in any great website. These five metrics are:
- Backlinks: What are backlinks? Well, for instance, if cnn.com “backlinks” to your site, that’s good. Since cnn.com is a “highly authoritative” site it’s quite a valuable backlink to have.
- Domain Authority: We just said that cnn.com was “highly authoritative”. For analytics purposes, that’s a bit vague. Online marketers prefer to think in terms of “Domain Authority”: it’s a search engine ranking score out of 100. In “Domain Authority” terms, cnn.com scores 99/100. In the L&D sector, towardsmaturity.org, for instance, scores 55/100. You get the idea.
- Indexed pages: The best websites usually have quite a lot of pages, usually because most B2B marketers understand the power of content marketing and know that blogging frequently helps businesses get found online. Sometimes a company blogs quite a lot, but Google’s web crawlers can’t find the blogs. This is because the page is badly indexed. It means you’re spending lots of time writing blogs but not enough time making sure your blogs get read and shared.
- MOZrank: This is one of our favourites. It’s an overall health score ( where 1 is lowest and 10 is highest). It’s not created by Google, so we think it adds a lot of extra objectivity to our chart.
- SEMrush rank: This displays how high a presence the –Company– domain has on the internet based on organic rankings and search traffic. For instance, in our L&D version of the chart, Adobe has a SEMrush rank of 246, which means that Adobe is the 246th most present website on the internet based on organic rankings and search traffic.
Why is the chart so incredibly useful?
We’ve found that many of the ranking tools available to B2B marketers aren’t actually all that helpful. Usually, that’s because they measure one website’s performance against all other websites. They don’t really compare, like with like.
For instance: Adobe ranks very high in our chart. But for SEMrush, Adobe is only the 246th most “present” site on the internet. That’s because SEMrush is measuring Adobe against a lot of other sites that Adobe doesn’t really care about (especially in the eLearning space) like Google or Amazon, but Adobe is not competing with these guys.
What’s more important perhaps, is that taken in isolation, each individual ranking factor (number of backlinks, domain authority, MozRank, etc) provides only a partial picture. The Now|Comms ranking looks at all of these factors together to position a business in a sensible industry context.
Hope that helps
If you’re in our top 100 L&D Chart that’s awesome. If you’re not, or if you want to rank higher, then we’re happy to audit your site and scope out an improvement plan.If that is something you’d like to chat about just book a call with Ken and we’ll have a chinwag.