RivalFlow customers have been improving their web pages for a little more than a year now. Earlier this summer, we added a major release: you can connect your Google Search Console account inside RivalFlow. Whenever you complete a RivalFlow project for a single page, it marks that spot on a GSC results chart. Now you can see before-and-after performance of RivalFlow updates for every page you improve.
RivalFlow builds on Google's steadfast position: they reward helpful content. A RivalFlow project compares your page to a competitor's page that outranks yours. It digs into the differences to find what's missing and writes new text you can add that fills those topical gaps.
All of that makes your page far more helpful than it was.
Expanding a page is one thing, but with RivalFlow you're adding rich, insightful details that audiences crave. Google takes notice, and you can count on powerful SEO results.
And that brings us to this video. If you haven't tried RivalFlow yet, it can be hard to connect the dots between a simple idea and such powerful results. So see for yourself as we peek at totally random, completely anonymous customer results in this live and unedited video.
And since additional supporting details make your page more authoritative and helpful, it's a no-risk solution. That falls in line with our "do no harm" guideline we used when we created RivalFlow from the start. If you trust us to help boost your SEO content performance, we want nothing short of wow-worthy results for you.
In November before heading to the Brighton SEO show, we wanted to show attendees what RivalFlow was doing for our customers, and the results charts fit the bill.
To show them without revealing any customer details, we anonymized thousands of individual results pages and dropped them into a spreadsheet, sorted by date. (Don't worry, these links only work for approved RivalFlow employees.)
We can click into the spreadsheet to see a results page without any idea of the kind of performance we'd see.
This range of diverse industries, domain strengths, average rankings, and age of the pages gave us a wide enough sampling to see that the results aren't limited to special cases. Call it a slice of our average customer base, but that's where "average" ends.
Well, nothing, but it makes for good randomization. And that makes for good transparency.
While at the Brighton SEO conference, we showed attendees how RivalFlow worked, and--even better--how it worked. We were excited to see so many results charts, straight from Google Search Console, going up and to the right. That's even the inspiration for the RivalFlow logo: impressions and clicks that move in an upward growth direction on a chart.
While we were thrilled, we knew that visitors would be more skeptical.
Bring in the birthday trick to the rescue.
Here's a peek at how the birthday trick helps us to show unbiased, spontaneous proof that RivalFlow works.
I can show you a before-and-after report that displays the skyrocketing success from a RivalFlow update. You might shrug and think "well, of course you showed me that one."
Fair enough.
But try this: Tell us your birthday, and let's peek at results from projects that were completed on that date. It's a perfect randomizer that keeps things unexpected and out of our hands. It removes any chance of picking only the charts that made us shine. Still, the SEO growth showed up report after report.
That's why we made a list of thousands of anonymous reports to choose from, removing any idea that we're cherry picking results. With user IDs and domains converted into a mess of characters, the only recognizable entry is the date that a project was run. All of our samples are listed by date.
If you watch the full video where we pick reports at random, you might notice that some dates give better, fleshed-out examples. The data has had a chance to simmer. No matter what the results are, you should have a fair snapshot of the page's performance, and some months do that better than others.
If we randomly pull more anonymous reports from projects that were completed in July, it's for a more balanced view. That 4-month window gives us a reasonable amount of time to see results that are more likely to have been driven by RivalFlow updates. It helps to set aside the effects of other developments long after the updates like algorithm updates or major site changes.
RivalFlow launched in October 2023, so results from any projects created then used our original version of the tool that hadn't yet been optimized. We made this video in November 2024. Recent projects from this month are still gathering enough data to tell a visual story about what happened before and after RivalFlow updates. So while we are confident in choosing random projects in the list, those dates come loaded with asterisks.
For example, I completed a RivalFlow project for this page on November 26: https://www.spyfu.com/blog/google-search-operators/
I grabbed a screen shot of these results on December 2. The Improvements Made mark hits the middle of the chart, giving us equal "before" and "after" days to measure. As time passes, the chart will stretch back further too.
Compare to this early chart that is nearly a month old. A 4-week span like this usually gives us enough to see patterns emerge. It looks like the updates made immediate gains, much easier to see when we look at the metric counts at the top. The chart seems like it has a flat trend at first glance, but our total impressions 4 weeks after the update went up 4373 more than the total was before any improvements.
Purely from a transparency point of view, the early results report wouldn't be a fair snapshot to show as proof in the video. Results haven't firmed up enough one way or another, so we avoided dates that are too recent to give a solid picture of what's happening with the page's SEO performance.
Both charts should form a clearer picture as more data comes in. When we can see months at a time, the daily fluctuations are less distracting.
It's exciting to see results charts that soar upward, showing growth in impressions, keywords and clicks. There are still some stories happening in the details, too.
Impressions on the RivalFlow report chart are cumulative. The time span grows equally for the "before" time period and the "after" time period. In other words, the spot that you marked your project complete will appear on the chart as a divider line, and that date will always be in the middle.
When we show you results for 3 weeks later, we include results from 3 weeks before. With more time, the chart will stretch back to 2 months before and 2 months after--the timeframe is always equal, and your impressions, keywords, and clicks will be calculated off of those dynamic time spans.
Our team created a tool to blur out any identifying details about customers, their websites, or their URLs. This works at the browser level, so even live results in front of a show attendee will hide the details to ensure their privacy.
As we showed people proof of RivalFlow working for a wide array of websites, they asked about the privacy tool in demo after demo. Specifically, agency reps wanted to use it in their sales presentations. They could show their own successful results to potential customers without compromising their current clients' privacy.
Since we're here to solve problems, that was an easy call. We made it available as a Chrome Extension for anyone to hide sensitive or private details in a live demo or for screen shots.
There are two patterns we've spotted that look like things tanked, but let's take a closer look at what is going on.
Remember, the rule of RivalFlow is to do no harm. If our customers took an SEO hit, we're digging into it--fast. Not only are we determined to not hurt your content in any way, we are continuing to improve the tool through adjustments. Learning what hurt a page--if at all--tells us how to optimize the tool even further.
However, in many cases what we are seeing after a chart drops is often one of two things:
This chart is a good example of impressions and ranks falling, followed by new RivalFlow updates. Notice that the before-and-after marker appears after things took a turn downward. We see this kind of timing often because RivalFlow includes alerts that tell the team that ranks have fallen. Or, they noticed the drop themselves and chose to take action.
We expect that completing a RivalFlow project (using as much of the new content as possible, from as many of the questions as possible) should cause performance to improve from its earlier drop.
And that ties in well with our other common scenario: ranking dips that bounce back.
It's not as satisfying and powerful as the airplane take-off charts, but a bounce back is still pushing in the right direction.
This illusion makes it seem like the updates changed the page's trajectory for the worst, but the drop hit just before they finished. More importantly, the impressions bounced back. You can see that the lift hits about two weeks later, so it wasn't a long wait.
The opposite pattern is another kind of bounce back. Short spikes could be glitches or immediate surges, and then we see it fall back down. That description sounds like it didn't do much, but look closer. This earned the page growth in its impressions overall, giving them steady gains compared to what they had when they started.
These are important patterns to watch for, especially if you are presenting your results to clients. The metrics might help tell your story.
Notice that before the content team turned to RivalFlow, the impressions averaged in the 550 range, but let's look at its peaks. Its impressions peak in the 650 to 700 range before updates. And even if we removed the spikes, we'd see an upward trajectory of impression growth right after the RivalFlow updates.
Again, looking past the spikes, it's peaking in the 800 to 900 range, so that's about a 30% gain for this customer.. After updates it quickly went up and dropped again--but to a higher point than what it was. So even though it looks flat, it's moving in the right direction and showing proof of growth.
In some situations, the results take a surprising downturn. Worse, it's an abrupt cliff. That itself is a clue that something is off. Rankings and impressions rarely disappear overnight. When a page tanks, it usually looks like a steel downhill. So when we saw this chart with a suspicious section that bottomed out, it was worth digging into.
The answer makes more sense. This is a 301 redirect. The site owner made updates to the page and then chose to redirect the URL to another one. Since Google Search Console tracks the original URL, the data cuts out without the telltale downhill slope of dropped ranks. What you have here is a tracking issue, not a performance issue.
If you see that happen, the fastest method is to simply search the URL directly and see if it redirects you to another page.
As we opened tracking pages, we didn't see many instances of bad results that RivalFlow caused. In some cases, we couldn't save the page--at least not yet. Time can tell. But since a key guideline is to do no harm, the worst case scenario would be if things completely tanked after updating your page.
The more likely "bad" scenario is that things will just stay flat. However, if you updated your page with additional text and found yourself losing ground, be sure to back track. Undo the updates. Remove all the edits from your page and revert it to what it was.
Watch your results for another few days and weeks and compare performance to your other pages on the site. We have not seen or heard this happen after a RivalFlow update, but it's best to be prepared just in case.
Remember that the risk is low. It's better to update multiple pages than to dip your toe in the water on just one. Our track record across thousands of customer pages shows that impressions tend to go up and to the right, followed next by a growth in traffic and new keywords. And if we can't save that one tanked page--a rarity--we are often creating value for the same domain on other pages.
In that previous example, the page took a hard hit and then they tried RivalFlow on it. Unfortunately we couldn't revive that specific page, but RivalFlow updates--made on the same day--are pulling in impression gains, keyword gains, and click gains. This image above is from their account showing growth on other pages.
Let's hope they continue to make improvements across multiple pages. They could be looking at sitewide success and lifts across impressions and clicks like this team.
From the start, RivalFlow's core focus has been to improve existing content. Content creation—the starting point of the content cycle—has plenty of dedicated tools AI seemed perfect for that. The later stages, though, (like improving existing content) often went overlooked. That big void became our inspiration. And now, our latest updates support yet another part of the content cycle: getting unranked content to jump up onto the SERPs.
RivalFlow users can expand and improve their unranked pages, too. It's lifting about 40% of the stuck pages that were otherwise holding flat.
See how the Pick a Page feature gives you options to work on your pages that haven't made a jump up the SERP ranks--yet.
I wanted to end on a word about SEO metrics. We talked earlier about telling stories about what's happening with the page's performance data. There's more available than the charts. Scroll down below each page's chart to look at click growth and position growth by keyword.
And though we don't show average position on this chart, remember that as you start to rank for new keywords, it could cause your average position to go down. Keep that in mind as you present metrics to your team or clients.
In the past, we often said that clicks meant everything. This is usually a reminder that while rank growth is exciting, rankings truly matter when they bring in traffic. However, there's a different angle in the wake of Google adding AI Overviews (AIOs) at the top of search results pages and quick answers in featured snippets.
These features give searchers immediate answers on the SERP, with AI Overviews pulling together answers from a few different sources. Even if you are among those sources, you might not get the traffic. These are contributing to a rise in no-click searches since the SERP itself answers the question.
As a result, the impressions metric is starting to regain some footing as an SEO health indicator. Embrace it. It's a sign that Google sees you as an authority, and your page improvements can only contribute to future SERP and AIO appearances.
