These use cases demonstrate how custom alerts in AlertPanel can assist technical SEOs, content teams, and developers in identifying SEO issues and monitoring performance. These use cases provide scenarios where Botify’s custom alerts can be used across departments to monitor and track changes to your site.

Use cases that identify specific issues for the following audiences and objectives are provided below:

Use Case: Rise in Internal Links to Non-Indexable URLs

Scenario: “As an SEO, it is useful to know when non-indexable (Non-Canonical, NoIndex Status, Non-200 Status Code) URLs are internally linked to on the site.”

Custom Alert Benefit: Use this custom alert to be notified when a new set of pages receives a Non-Indexable internal link. Check the internal link and assess whether it is okay for the Non-Indexable page to stay on the site or if there is a better, alternative page that could be linked to that is capable of appearing in search results.

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Rise

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Number of Internal Outlinks to Non-Indexable URLs > 0

Use Case: Change in URLs Above/Below A Specified Page Depth

Scenario: “As an SEO, I must ensure strategic pages remain at a respectable depth from the home page and do not fall too deep into our site taxonomy.”

Was a page unexpectedly removed from one of our top category pages and is now no longer linked on the site?

Custom Alert Benefit: Page depth can influence ranking performance. Monitor your key pages to ensure they remain at a reasonable number of clicks from the home page.

In this custom alert example, Botify tracks the total number of URLs with a Page Depth of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. If the total number of URLs at this specified Page Depth of < 5 decreases, then Botify will alert you to which URLs saw their reported page depth go from < 5 to >= 5. With this information, you can understand what internal links changed and the steps you should take to get those pages higher up in your site’s taxonomy.

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Drop

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Depth < 5(Change to what you prefer)

Use Case: Rise in URLs Above a Specified HTML Load Time

Scenario: “As an Engineer, I need to monitor average Load Time to ensure users and bots receive the full HTML document of a page promptly.”

What happened to cause an increase in indexable Category pages with a reported “Load Time” of Slow?

Custom Alert Benefit: The “Load Time” metric factors in Time To First Byte, which measures the time it takes for the server to receive an initial request from the browser and send the first resource back to the browser. A higher Time To First Byte may indicate slower server performance, which would be highlighted in Botify’s Load Time metric. These insights can be used to understand where performant site speed improvements may exist.

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Rise

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Slow Load Time on Indexable Pages = Yes

Use Case: Change in URLs Above a Specified Delay To Render a Page Value

Scenario: “As an Engineer, I need to know when pages on our site reach a Delay To Render the Page score over 6 seconds.”

Custom Alert Benefit: Delay to Render the Page measures the amount of time it takes to execute and render the JavaScript of a page. This custom alert will identify pages that drop below a specified threshold (e.g., 6 seconds). Monitor your pages for abnormal increases in rendering time and ensure users and search engines can access your content in a respectable amount of time.

Monitoring Rise of Drop?
​Rise

Filter for Custom Alert:
​JS Rendering Successful = Yes
Delay to Render the Page > 6,000 ms (Change to what you prefer)

Use Case: Drop in Number of Ranking Pages for Specific Categories

Scenario: “As a Content Manager, I need to monitor and protect our organic rankings and be able to react quickly when pages drop from search results.”

Custom Alert Benefit: Receive a notification when pages drop below a specific threshold for Number of Impressions (based on the previous 30 days). The custom alert will flag each URL that drops below the specified number of impressions and you can begin to make optimizations as needed to recover rankings.

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Drop

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Number of Impressions > 0

Use Case: Rise in Blog Articles Flagged for Similarity Between Another Page (Thin/Duplicate Content)

Scenario: “As a Content Manager, I want to identify and review opportunities to remove thin, low-value content from my site.”

Custom Alert Benefit: For enterprise sites, it is very easy for legacy CMS platforms not to be ported over with 100% accuracy. Use a custom alert to monitor URLs and flag them in your system when they are reported as having a Similarity Score of 75% or higher with another page.

The Similar Indexable Pages score can be a beneficial way to identify duplicate content to consolidate and address thin-content opportunities (i.e., the group of URLs has a high similarity score because most of the content is templated navigational elements and the actual unique content is very small or “thin”).

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Rise

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Number of Similar Indexable Pages (Score >= 75%) > 0

Use Case: Rise in eCommerce Category Pages Below a Specified Number of Products

Scenario: “As an eCommerce Manager, I want to understand when products on a category page drop below a certain level to ensure users and search engines still continue to receive the experience we want them to.”

Custom Alert Benefit: Special promotions, seasonal category pages, an ever-changing product inventory - with so many product category pages being added and rotated based on the company's needs, eCommerce teams need to understand when products on a category page get low. This custom alert flags any category page with below 4 products so the eCommerce team can decide if it makes sense to restock the page’s inventory, redirect the page to an equivalent experience, deprecate the page, or keep it as it is. Quickly respond to situations where popular category pages mistakenly have their products removed or poor user experiences where a user lands on a category page with only 1 product.

Monitoring Rise or Drop?
​Rise

Filter for Custom Alert:
​Number of Product Tiles < 4
This custom alert is based on the use of Botify’s HTML Extraction tool.
​​

Copy the CSS class on your category pages that contain your product tiles. You can configure the HTML extraction to count each occurrence of this class on your category pages, which will help track how many products are on each page.

Use Case: Pages that are Perceived as Slow and Hurt Core Web Vital Performance

Scenario: With Core Web Vitals becoming a ranking signal for search results, I need to know when pages take a long time to load (LCP).

Custom Alert Benefit: This custom alert will identify when there is a peak of pages with a poor LCP Score. Monitor your website for increases in perceived load speed and ensure users find your pages useful.

Monitoring Rise of Drop?
Rise

What pages?

All pages

Filter for Custom Alert:
Report Available = Yes
LCP Score = Poor

See also:

Creating Custom Alerts in AlertPanel