As an SEO professional, the moment you get wind of a Google algorithm update, you immediately go into what I like to call “check mode”. Yep, that’s right, you go over all your work you have completed over the last few months and carefully check that you haven’t done anything which may negatively impact your site when the new algorithm update gets rolled out.
Most large algorithm updates we know about, as Google does announce these with a date they will roll out and it doesn’t take long for publications such as ours to catch onto this and distribute the news.
However what about the micro updates that don’t get announced? Sometimes these can have a profound impact on your site positively or negatively with out much warning.
This is why I’ll run through the top Google algorithm tools that you should keep handy in your bookmarks and check on a weekly basis.
SEMrush Sensor
SEMRush Sensor is a free algorithm tracking tool provided by SEMrush.
This is one of my favourite tools, mainly for its ease of use and features.
The tool starts off with a daily widget with gives you an indication of SERP volatility today out of a range of 10.
The second graph which is my favourite, which provides you a chart of SERP volatility over the last 30 days which breaks its ranges up in Low, Normal, High & Very High. The beauty about this chart is that you have the ability to filter by category of your site or business.
Below you have the ability to see which featured of Google has been affected such as Featured snippets, Local Packs, Shopping Results and more.
You can check out more from SEMrush Sensor here: https://www.semrush.com/sensor/?category=&db=US
MozCast
Similar to SEMrush, MozCast provides turbulence in the Google algorithm over the past week and displays in a nice easy to read weather cast format which is quite awesome as it provides a very simplified view of everything and is built to check on a daily basis as you would with the weather forecast.
MozCast is broken up into 3 core sections. As seen above, a weather cast for the current day followed by a weather forecast over the last 30 days and a quick weekly forecast widget.
You can check more of MozCast here: https://moz.com/mozcast/
Cognitive SEO Signals
Cognitive SEO signals is another easy way to keep track of any Google algorithm updates. Again following suit of MozCast, it presents a very easy to view format of any algorithm changes. With features such as filtering by impacting search engine positions, regions and date ranges you can get a very simple view of any algorithm fluctuations for your set parameters.
You can check more of Cognitive SEO signals here: https://cognitiveseo.com/signals/