As we start 2021 I wanted to give you all a little recap on Hike’s highlights from last year.
It’s already been said a million times, but for many reasons last year was a terrible year. I don’t need to list why here; everyone reading this will have been (and still are being) negatively impacted by the global pandemic we’re experiencing.
It was a year that Hike had to adapt, evolve, and power-through so our users received the best possible support and product to help their business through extremely difficult circumstances.
COVID-19 highlighted the need for SEO
We’re in a position where our product can directly impact the success of a small business through COVID-19. The world went online, and so did small businesses – whether they were prepared or not.
The increase in demand for SEO rocketed as customers, stuck at home, browsed the Google search results as they would their local high street or shopping mall.
Hike 2020 achievements
I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved last year. We grew as a team, we grew our product offering and we grew our user base, helping almost 1300 more users than we did by the end of 2019.
We’ve put together a little infographic to highlight some of the key stats for the Hike product last year…
There’s a lot to digest there, but I can sum it up in one sentence; in every area – whether product or user usage – we had seen a significant increase compared to 2019.
What was new in Hike?
The Hike product evolved a lot last year, due both to increased demand caused by the pandemic and to further improving and refining the platform.
I’ve cherry-picked below some of the key product updates we rolled out in 2020:
New Features 🤩
SEO report tool – you can now run a quick, free SEO report for your website, and we’ll show you top keyword rankings, some basic SEO actions to complete, competitor comparison, and more. Also, this tool can be white-labeled for our agencies.
Backlink Healthcheck – Hike will help you to identify, analyse, and fix any harmful backlinks that are detrimental to your SEO rankings.
JavaScript-based web crawler – Hike now works with websites that are built using full JavaScript frameworks, something that is becoming more and more popular.
Hike API (x2) – we released two separate API’s in 2020, enabling more businesses to utilise Hike’s data in their applications.
Google Maps keyword tracking – know where your business ranks in the Google Map results? Simply tell Hike the keyword and locations you are targeting and we’ll track your position in both the Google Map pack and the Google Map listings page.
New billing portal – we rolled out a brand new billing portal where you can easily and quickly see all of your billing information including your current Hike plan, payment details, and your billing history.
Domain Authority tracking – if you’re building new backlinks you need to know what impact this is having on your website’s SEO authority. Hike will track your domain authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow scores over time.
Product Updates 🤓
XML sitemap integration – Hike now crawls your XML sitemap. The sitemap is super important for your SEO so you don’t want it to have any errors – plus it can help Hike identify other issues. You will start to see actions around the XML sitemap, such as 3XX/4XX/5XX issues, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages with a noindex tag, and more.
SEO content discovery – we’ve rolled out a complete redesign on the content topic finder feature. Not only does the tool look and perform better, but we now also bring back the popular Google ‘People Also Ask’ questions for each search you do; these are a goldmine for content ideas.
Google Search Console integration – Hike will now show you Google Search Console reporting data. Review the number of clicks and impressions over time and even compare dates. Also – keep an eye out for more Search Console-based actions appearing in your actions page in early 2021.
White-label improvements – we rolled out a number of improvements to the white-label functionality, including the ability to sell SEO retainers to clients and improved reporting.
Find your ‘true’ SEO competitors – the platform will identify who your top competitors are in Google, across your entire keyword set. You can then add them as a competitor in the platform and find keyword and backlink opportunities.
Report export functionality – you can now download PDF reports from the main sections within Hike, such as keyword performance and SEO actions. For our white-label users, your agency logo will be used instead of the Hike logo, too.
Blogger backlink opportunities – this new feature within the link building section of the Hike platform will show you any social media requests from bloggers who are actively looking for brands to partner with, whether via guest posting, collaborations, or advertising.
What’s Coming in 2021?
We’ve got lots planned for this year and we’re really excited to share it with you all. Alongside our upcoming built-in SEO course (which we can’t wait to show you), we’ll be developing many areas of the platform and improving the existing tool set. Look out for improvements in reporting, a whole new bunch of SEO actions, improved keyword discovery features, API development and a whole lot more!
If you’ve got any feedback on what we can do to improve the platform for 2021 then please let us know.
Happy new year; we hope this year is better than the last for every one of you!
