2019 updates to the Siteimprove Platform

Here you can see the updates made to the Siteimprove platform in 2019.

December 19, 2019:

Removing Siteimprove crawler traffic

From today onward, Siteimprove crawler traffic will no longer appear in your visitor data in the Siteimprove platform. 

Improved search experience in Universal Search

Data Privacy customers can now search for phone numbers, national identification numbers (like CPR, SSN), and email addresses across sites, files, and meta data.

You can more easily filter search results by specific site(s), and you can select favorite sites in the filter.

Cookies: Secure or not secure 

The Cookies table in Data Privacy now also offers a column that indicates whether detected cookies are secure, not secure, or a mix. “Mixed” cookies are secure on some pages but not secure on others.

A secure cookie instructs the browser that the cookie may only be sent to a server when the connection is encrypted. Cookies that are not secure will be sent to both http:// (not encrypted) and https:// (encrypted) connections.

Only setting a cookie when the connection is secure prevents third parties from retrieving the data collected by the cookie.

December 12, 2019:

Schedule and send automatic dashboard reports 

Create a dashboard report and schedule it to be emailed automatically to your stakeholders.

Cross-site DCI scores in your Management dashboard

The Management Dashboard now includes the total number of sites on your account, the average DCI Score, and the average score for Quality Assurance, Accessibility, and SEO respectively.

”DCI Score progress” graph added to dashboard widget library

You can now add the "DCI Score progress" graph (for a single site) to your customizable dashboard. 

Data Privacy: CSV export of tracked search terms

You can now export the search terms you track with Universal Search in Data Privacy to CSV. 

SEO: Optional notes on Target Page Optimization overview

Notes can now be added on the Target Page Optimization overview. This offers a shared reference point for why a page is being optimized. All users on an account will be able to view the notes.

December 5, 2019:

SEO: Updated character limits for meta titles

To follow industry recommendations, we now flag meta titles when they are shorter than 40 characters (previously 60) or longer than 75 (previously 70).

Policy: New rule available 

We have added a new rule to the selection of "Content Policy" rules: "First detected date".

Use this rule to create a policy related to the first time Siteimprove detected a page on your site. The new library template "New pages with broken links" is based on this rule and finds pages added to Siteimprove within the last month that contain one of more broken links.

November 28, 2019:

SEO: “Diamond” Activity Plan now “Custom” Activity Plan

We have changed the name of the Diamond Activity Plan tier to Custom. Custom plans have a customized number of keywords and frequency of keyword data updates, and this is now reflected in the name.

SEO: Monitored Keywords table has received a face-lift 

The way information is presented in the Monitored Keywords table has been restructured to make it more clear and digestible:

CMS Plugins in three categories

Siteimprove integrates with a number of different CMS plugins. Depending on the plugin, we are able to offer different levels of support and the plugins are now divided into three categories on our website:

Siteimprove provided plugins: These plugins are provided and developed by Siteimprove with help from our partners. Support for these plugins is handled by Siteimprove Support.

Vendor provided plugins: These plugins are developed by the CMS vendor in close collaboration with Siteimprove. Support will be handled by the CMS vendor.

Community plugins: These plugins are developed and supported by third party companies/communities. Siteimprove does not provide plugin support for these. Please read the support details on the specific plugin pages.

November 14, 2019:

New: Marketing Automation Integrations [Now live on all markets]

You can now maintain and optimize the content on your landing pages if they are generated via one of the following marketing software: HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. Setting up a marketing integration will make it possible to add all your landing pages to your Siteimprove platform. It is also possible to uniquely tag your landing pages, making it easy to distinguish them from other pages on your website.

Read more about the three Marketing Automation Integrations that are available: HubSpot, Pardot & Marketo.

Analytics / Settings [Now live on all markets]

Additional Settings options are now available under Analytics > Settings. These options allow you to configure the domains associated with your Analytics sites. Account Owners have view/edit access for these new settings. Administrators have view access only.

Customize user access to Siteimprove Performance

In Settings > Users > Roles, it is now possible to customize which account roles should have access to the Performance module.

November 7, 2019:

Help Center answer bot [Live on selected markets: AU, CAN, UK & US]

When you submit a technical support ticket, the automatic email confirming we have received your message now includes suggested Help Center articles that may be exactly what you were looking for. If this is not the case, our Technical Support team will assist as usual.

SEO Advanced: Custom columns in Keyword Monitoring 

It is now possible to customize columns in the SEO > Research > Monitored Keywords table. The custom columns filter lets you decide which data points you'd like to see to make the data more digestible and relevant. 

SEO Advanced: Keyword details now exportable 

It is now possible to export data from the keyword details in the table under SEO > Research > Monitored Keywords. You can view the keyword details by clicking a keyword in the table and then export the details to for example a dashboard.

October 31, 2019:

Updated Accessibility PDFs section

The Accessibility PDF section now includes all accessibility tested PDFs, not just the PDFs failing our accessibility test. Two new sticky filters have been added to the table: "Last modified" and "Number of Issues". The first has an option specifically related to the 2018 EU Directive.

Policy: New "Page tag" rule 

A new rule is now available for Content Policies: "Page tag". This is useful for creating policies that should only target a subset of (tagged) pages.

October 23, 2019:

NEW: Marketing Automation Integrations [Live on selected markets: AU, CAN, UK & US]

You can now maintain and optimize the content on your landing pages if they are generated via marketing software such as HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot. Setting up a marketing integration will make it possible to add all your landing pages to your Siteimprove platform. It is also possible to uniquely tag your landing pages, making it easy to distinguish them from other pages on your website.

Read more about the three Marketing Automation Integrations that are available: HubSpot, Pardot & Marketo.

Analytics / Settings [Live on selected markets: AU, CAN, UK & US]

Additional Settings options are now available under Analytics > Settings. These options allow you to configure the domains associated with your Analytics sites. Account Owners have view/edit access for these new settings. Administrators have view access only.

October 17, 2019:

Page tagging

You can now use page tags in three areas of the Siteimprove platform (see below). Tagging pages with a word or short sentence allows you to better categorize and manage your pages.

1. "Pages" in Quality Assurance. Located under Inventory.
2. "Pages" in Accessibility. Located in the main left-hand menu.
3. "Pages" lists in Policy and when creating or editing a content policy.

You can filter the tables by one or multiple page tags and create/edit/remove tags directly from the table. When creating or editing a content policy, you can add tags that will then be added automatically to any existing or future page that matches the policy. 

Note: Only Administrators and Account Owners can add, edit, and delete tags.

October 10, 2019

Dashboard Reports

• Preview report: The preview option is now available in the Dashboard beta reports. This gives you the opportunity to see how a Dashboard report will look before you send it via email.

• Sticky sorting on dashboard widgets: We have received a lot of feedback while having our email Dashboard report feature in Beta. One improvement that we have now implemented is making the sorting sticky. So any sorting you apply before adding a widget to the dashboard or when editing a widget will be sticky and persistent for that widget both on the live Dashboard and in Dashboard reports.

October 4, 2019

SEO Advanced

• More overview data for each Activity Plan: In response to our users requesting more information summing up key data points in Activity Plans, we added to the highlights area on the Activity Plan details page. You can now see the total number of keywords monitored, total search volume and average position for all keywords. We have also included estimated traffic data along with the new highlights.

September 26, 2019

SEO Advanced

• Create a new Activity Plan on the fly: You can now create Activity plans when carrying out keyword research. Previously the only option was to add a new keyword to an existing plan, but now there is also the option to create a brand new Activity Plan for the newly added keyword.

Accessibility

• Page error rate: When working on Accessibility issues you either approach them at issue level, where you look to fix a specific issue across the entire site or a group, or at page level, where fixing all accessibility issues on a specific page is your target. To make it easier, we have now separated DCI points relating to pages into a new tab on the Accessibility overview page - Page error rate. The new tab will present issues relating to page level 1,2 and 3+ and the associated DCI score.

Accessibility

• Change in DCI calculation: CSS and HTML validator results have been removed from the DCI calculation. This will allow our users to have more focus on the accessibility issues.

SEO Advanced

• Localized Keywords now available on all markets: On 15th March, we released Localized Keywords. This feature enables you to monitor how you are ranking compared to local competitors and focus on promoting your products/services to the prospects and customers closest to you. Local SEO is now also available on the following markets: Austria, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Singapore.

September 19, 2019

Dashboards

• Add another widget: When constructing a dashboard, you often want to add multiple widgets. We have now made it quicker/easier to add multiple widgets to a dashboard at the same time.

September 12, 2019

Policy

• Private policies now possible: If the policy you are creating contains sensitive information, or is not ready to be shared with others, you are now able to mark access as "Only Me".
  Policies are shared as default.

September 5, 2019

Ads

• Siteimprove Ads available worldwide: Originally launched to a select number of markets in July, we are now very pleased to announce that Ads is available worldwide. Ads automatically audits your Google Ads campaigns for improvements in Ads, landing pages, and budgets so you can save time on the basics and focus on growth.
  Read more about Siteimprove Ads and sign up for a 14 day free trial today.

Performance 

• Siteimprove Performance available worldwide: Originally launched to a select number of markets in July, we are now very pleased to announce that Performance is available worldwide. Performance helps you optimize your website’s load time and improve visitor experience, SEO rankings, and ultimately, your bottom line.
  Read more about Siteimprove Performance and sign up for a 14 day free trial today.
• Improved creation flow to address URLs behind geo blockers: Adding a new page to be monitored is now even smarter when it comes to the multiple visitor profiles that we have available. We now pre-check the URL from all our available measurement locations. If we see that visiting the URL from a specific location result in a redirect we will let you know. Any blocked locations will come with a warning and these locations will be removed from the visitor profile options.

Accessibility

• Accessibility Score on My Sites and Groups: The Accessibility Score (which contributes DCI Score) has been added to the My Sites and the Groups table within Accessibility. It is important to be able to compare at site and group level. Furthermore, we have also optimized My site's load time – so check it out!
  

August 29, 2019

SEO

• Custom Activity Plan adjustment:SEO Advanced customers now have more flexibility around our credit system and Custom Activity Plan. Customers have the option to create Custom Activity Plans with a minimum of 10 keywords and up to 1000 keywords.
• Credit overview page update: The SEO credit overview page in SEO Advanced settings has been updated to provide a clear overview of credit usage per site. We now list the Activity Plans and tires per site including how many keywords are being monitored and how many competitors each Activity Plan has.

Platform

• 'Submit a ticket' within the platform: As part of our continued efforts to give customers easy access to help and support resources, we have added the possibility to create a support ticket from within the platform. Users can simply click on the question mark in the bottom right, then 'Submit a ticket' to send us a question.
  

August 15, 2019

SEO

• SEO Policies: You can now quickly access all Policies that have been tagged with SEO directly from the SEO module. Creating SEO policies that relate to your organisation can be a great supplement to the SEO checks provided by Siteimprove.

Performance

• Edit functionality: Even though Performance has only been available for a limited period of time, we are already adding functionality requested by our early adopters. As a user you can now edit a page that is being monitored by Performance, so you can add or remove visitor profiles.

Data Privacy

• Ignoring per instance of personal data:  Context is key when evaluating if an identified instance of personal data is something to take action on or not. Ignoring per instance allows you to ignore any false positives, whilst being confident that we will let you know if a new instance of that piece of data appears anywhere else on your website in the future.

August 1, 2019

Data Privacy

• Personal data graphs on the overview page: Graphs relating to personal data detected across all sites are now available as soon as you enter the Data Privacy module. This addition means that you now have a better overview across all sites both in regards to domains and personal data.

SEO Advanced

• Target page optimization link: Keywords and target pages go hand-in-hand when you work with SEO. We have now made it even easier to start optimizing your target pages directly from the Key Word Monitoring section. Look out for the new optimization icon.

SEO Advanced

• Localized Keywords now available on more markets: On 15th March, we released Localized Keywords. This feature enables you to monitor how you are ranking compared to local competitors and focus on promoting your products/services to the prospects and customers closest to you. Local SEO is now also available on the following markets: Sweden and Finland.

July 11, 2019

Dashboard Reports

• Email report - Now in Beta: We have been testing out this new feature for a while now, and are very pleased to introduce it to all of our users. Now you can email your dashboards to any number of recipients. This feature is in Beta mode right now and there are plenty of opportunities to give us feedback.

SEO Advanced

• Remove target page: Target pages are an important part of optimizing your website for search engines. Unfortunately, it has not been that easy to remove a target page again without having to remove selected keywords. We have fixed this now!

July 4, 2019

Policy

• Four new policy templates:The Policy library offers a whole range of ready-made templates that you can add to your account by the click of a button. Most recently, the following policies have been added to the library:
  • Homepage missing image alt text
  • Popular pages with broken links
  • High-level pages with broken links
  • Large pages with multiple referrals

July 2, 2019

New Siteimprove Ads product launched

• Siteimprove Ads: Ads automatically audits your Google Ads campaigns for improvements in ads, landing pages, and budgets so you can save time on the basics and focus on growth.
  Read more about Siteimprove Ads and sign up for a 14 day free trial today.

New Siteimprove Performance product launched

• Siteimprove Performance: Performance helps you optimize your website’s load time and improve visitor experience, SEO rankings, and ultimately, your bottom line.
  Read more about Siteimprove Performance and sign up for a 14 day free trial today.

June 28, 2019

SEO Advanced

• Localized Keywords now available on more markets: On 15th March, we released Localized Keywords on limited markets (US, Canada, Netherlands and Belgium). This feature enables you to monitor how you are ranking compared to local competitors and focus on promoting your products/services to the prospects and customers closest to you. Local SEO is now also available on the following markets (Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and UK).

June 27, 2019

Data Privacy

• My sites: My Sites offers a view across all the sites you have access to as a user. The My Sites page within Data Privacy now contains additional information regarding the number of personal data types that have been detected on each site, and the total number across all sites. The table also offers an indicator for the number of new instances that have been detected over the past 30 days.

Policy

• My Policies: It is always beneficial to be able to sort and prioritize items in a long list. The My Policies table now includes the star icon and the ability to boost selected policies to the top of the list. The star icon within the Siteimprove platform is user specific. It enables you to prioritize and order items in a way that suits your workflow.

June 20th, 2019

Manage User Access to Sites and Groups

• Grant user access to site/groups via the Sites table: You can now edit user access to a site and its groups in one go! - We've made a change in the Setting section, due to customer feedback. You can bulk apply user access to a site (and its groups) via the Sites table under Settings. You no longer have to make these changes on an individual user basis. "Edit user access to site/groups" is available in the options menu for each site.

Policy improvements

• Recheck option available for list of Policy matches: It is now possible to recheck pages where Policy matches have been found directly from the Siteimprove platform. The recheck icon is available to the right of each page.

Help Center

• Getting started upgraded: It is extremely important to us that our users get the best possible start with our platform. Our aim with the Help Center is to provide our users a variety of help options (everyone learns differently) around topics and themes. These new sections now include short videos, reference relevant courses if one is available, groups together relevant articles and suggests in-tool tutorials.

June 12th, 2019

Policy

• Changing the Policy menu: When speaking with our users, we often hear how useful they find the Policy Library and My Policies. Policy Library offers a lot of "pre-baked" policies, spanning numerous verticals and content areas, where Siteimprove has already done the groundwork and you can just plug-and-play for your own sites. My Policies offers an easy overview of all the policies that have been created. Based on this user feedback, we have made a few small changes to the Policy menu, so these options are now visible at the top level.

June 5th, 2019

Data Privacy

• Personal data in pages and files: We have expanded the range of file types covered within data privacy, so you can now get an overview of all file types on your site (including HTML pages) where personal data (Personal Identification Numbers, email address and phone numbers) has been detected. See Data Privacy: Technical Specifications for list of file types.

May 29, 2019

Data Privacy

• Email addresses now detected in pages and files: When dealing with personal data it is vital to have a full overview of where it appears throughout your site, regardless of file type. Within Data Privacy, we have broadened the scope of where we can detect email addresses beyond HTML pages to include other file types. See Data Privacy: Technical Specifications for list of file types.

May 22, 2019

SEO

• Focus Issues: When dealing with issues on your site, it is often useful to group issues together that you want to focus on here-and-now. Focus issues enable you to highlight the SEO issues that you want to focus on. Located on the "Issues and Recommendations" page, simply select issues, and use the Focus issues tab as your work-list. Focus issues are user and site-specific.

Accessibility

• Hex codes now displayed for color contrast issues One Accessibility issue that our users have a lot of focus on is Color Contrast, where the color of the text and the color of the background are not in sufficient contrast to each other. In order for our users to address this issue, we have received many requests to display Hex codes in addition to RGB. So that is what we have done! For each text color and background color, we now display the Hex code alongside RGB.

May 15, 2019

SEO Advanced

• Localized Keywords in Activity Plans: You can now monitor how you are ranking compared to local competitors and focus on promoting your products/services to the prospects and customers closest to you. When setting up an Activity plan, you can select State/Region and then City – depending on how granular you want to go. Local SEO is currently only available on limited markets (US, Canada, Netherlands and Belgium), and we will update you as soon as it becomes available on other markets.

Quality Assurance

• Inventory tables available in dashboards: You can now export any table within QA inventory to a dashboard of your choice. It is not possible to export the Site Map page to a dashboard.

May 1, 2019

Analytics

• Improvements to Campaigns: Additional Learn component added and more informative empty states included. Additional tabs (Term, Content and Landing pages) added under Traffic segments in Campaign details.

Data Privacy

• Data Privacy Settings actions included in User Action Log: All actions associated with the Data Privacy Settings are now included within the User Action Log.
• Allowing Ignore/Unignore for email addresses and phone numbers: Ignore options are now available for email addresses and phone numbers within the Personal Data section of Data Privacy.

April 17, 2019

Data Privacy

• Names removed under Personal Data: After careful evaluation of the quality and volume of the results presented, the Names component has been removed from the "Personal Data" section. If you are interested to see if, and where, a name appears on your site, you can utilize the Universal Search feature. Universal Search provides the additional benefits of looking for names across all sites on the account, and allows you to broaden your search across data files, documents and pages.

April 10, 2019

Platform:

• Multi selection of tags now possible:If you have a lot of sites on your account, it can be useful to use the tagging feature to group these sites together. Multi selection of tags is now available in all the places in the platform where tags are used, making it easier to view all sites that have multiple tags in common, or to view all sites across a range of tags. Once a component has been filtered by selected tags, this view can also be exported to a dashboard. Tags are currently used in the following areas of the platform:
  • Users
  • Sites / My Sites
  • SEO Keywords
  • SEO Activity Plans

April 4, 2019

SEO:

• Limits changed for three SEO checks:We have made changes to the limits associated with the following three SEO checks, based on user feedback:
  • Check: Too many internal links on a page
  • Check: Text to code ratio
  • Check: Low word content count

March 20, 2019

SEO:

• SEO Issues are no longer flagged on non-canonical pages: Canonical tags can be used to indicate which page you’d like a search engine (e.g. Google) to index when you have multiple pages with very similar/identical content on your website. When it comes to SEO, it is not necessary for Siteimprove to provide results and SEO advice for pages that are not intended or expected to be indexed by search engines. From now on, we will not flag issues on non-canonical pages in Siteimprove SEO, and highlight if a "non-canonical" page has been selected as a Target Page in SEO Advanced. Read about the changes in the platform relating to canonical tags in our help center article.

Accessibility:

• Date picker introduced to the Accessibility progress graph: You can now view data in the Accessibility progress graph back to September 2017. This implementation has been championed by a range of users wishing for more control over the time frame they are viewing within the Accessibility module.

March 13, 2019

Platform-wide updates:

• Keyboard navigation improvements: All actions and interactive components are now available to keyboard users when they are using the Siteimprove platform (my2 domain). You are now able to access all interactive elements on a page using the keyboard in the same way that you can interact with them using a mouse. The improvements also include: focus after performing an action, skip to content button, the ability to close modals and lists with the Esc. key and ensuring logical tab order.

Analytics:

• Funnels and User Journey components exportable to dashboard: These components are now available as widgets to be exported to your dashboard.
• Analytics Settings menu: The many options available for the Analytics module within Settings: IP-groups, Filters, Feedback, Parameters/Campaigns and Privacy have now been relocated to the Analytics module. They are placed within a new left hand menu item called Analytics Settings.

March 6, 2019

Platform-wide updates:

• Site/group selection: After you log in, you will now be taken to the site/group you previously viewed in the Siteimprove platform.
• Table view configuration moved to user profile: The ability to specify if you would like the title, URL or both displayed within the Siteimprove tables is now available under your user profile.

February 27, 2019

Analytics

• Campaigns: We're relaunching the Campaigns feature: track what drives traffic and conversions, build more consistent UTM links, and manage all your campaigns in one place.

February 20, 2019

Quality Assurance

• Edit spelling suggestions: You can now edit suggested spelling corrections in Spelling so that your own spelling suggestion is displayed instead.  
• Page Report link in QA exports: Files exported from Quality Assurance now have a direct link to the Page Report.
• My Sites load time cut by 75%: Performance improvements to the My Sites table means it now loads significantly faster (and we're working on making the graph load faster as well).
• List of pages checked in Single Page Check: Administrators and Account Owners (or roles with those permissions) can see and delete pages that have been run through the Single Page Check by other users.

Accessibility/SEO

• CSS validation: Due to popular request we have updated our CSS validation service to validate CSS files against CSS Level 3 + SVG. This means you might see a small change in your DCI, SEO, and Accessibility Scores.

Data Privacy

• Edit email recipients for personal identification number alerts: You can now edit who is set up to receive email alerts when new personal identification numbers are detected on a site.

February 13, 2019

Accessibility

• Starred issues: You can now "star" Accessibility issues that you want to revisit later. You'll be able to see them in a separate list for easy access, and track your progress on starred issues.

Data Privacy

• Personal Identification Number formats and email alerts: See which country-specific formats for personal identification numbers are being detected on your sites, and whom you're sending reports about detected numbers to.

CMS Plugins

• Magnolia CMS Plugin: The CMS plugin is now available for users of Magnolia CMS.

January 23, 2019

Quality Assurance: 

• Preferred spelling suggestions now carry over to the redesigned Spelling module: If you had marked a preferred spelling suggestion in the previous version of the Spelling module, we've preserved and reinstated those preferences in the new version.
• Spelling suggestions on Page Report: See suggested spelling corrections in the Page Report so you can judge whether it's the right spelling in context.
• Sub-tables in Spelling can be exported: Export expanded sub-tables in Spelling. This functionality was available in the previous version of Spelling and has been reinstated in the new version.

SEO

• Five new SEO checks: We've added three new checks that flag empty, missing, or multiple H1 headers, and two new checks for multiple meta descriptions or meta titles, all of which can negatively affect your SEO. This means that your DCI and SEO Scores might go down a bit (but they'll go right back up once you've fixed your meta tags).

CMS Plugins

• Adobe Experience Manager, SiteVision, Sitebox, IPROX: Siteimprove now integrates with these four content management systems. Read more about the new CMS plugins for Adobe,SiteVision, Sitebox, and IPROX.

 Platform-wide updates:

• Discontinuing support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1: We're discontinuing support for deprecated encryption protocols, namely TLS 1.0 and 1.1 from March 2019. Please read more about which encryption protocols we support and the deadlines for use of deprecated protocols.

January 9, 2019

Quality Assurance: 

• Highlighted spelling errors and spelling suggestions in Misspellings tab: Misspelled words in the "Misspellings" tab are highlighted to indicate where the misspelling has occurred. Suggested spelling corrections are also offered, as for words in the "Needs Review" tab.

SEO

• Top Keywords by Domain: Search for a domain to see what high search-volume keywords it ranks for. Read more about Top Keywords by Domain in Spotlight on New Features and Updates.