Spruiking your startup, then rejecting everybodies money...
[Update: Bryan from Rankiac got back to me today (25Nov) apologising for their lack of response and pleading mail server / google mail problems. I've now managed to pay to extend the trial into a Pro account, and to their credit they've continued to collect the data I wanted between the free trial expiry and the purchase of a Pro account, so that's good. Now they just need to convince me 14 day turnarounds on critical service queries are not "the norm"...]
I found this really useful website - it's doing something I've been on-and-off working on for a while, in a much more polished and useable fashion than I've been planning. It's called Rankiac, and it does daily Google searches for your keywords and tells you where your website is ranking, and produces historical data of those SERPs. It also does backlink monitoring, both for your site and your competitors sites. It's surprisingly cool.
I grabbed the 14 day free trial, and it fully lived up to it's claims.
So I went to pay for a subscription:
only to be greeted with this:
Oops! I'm sure they'll _hate_ finding they've bungled such a critical bit of a web based business, I'l let them know right away so they can fix it! So I hunted and hunted and hunted, 'cause their only contact info is buried down on the privacy page, and mailed them when I only had 5 days of free trial left, and again 2 days later. I'm now down to one day of free trial left, I haven't heard back from them, and it's still impossible to pay them.
So now I'm looking around to see if they've got any half-way decent competitors...
The thing thats most amusing (perhaps even ironic) is that I found out about this service through a discussion post on a HackerNews article titled "Things you should do immediately after launching a website."
Here's my #1 "Things you should do immediately after launching a website." tip: Make sure your "Buy Now" buttons work! (and checking/responding to customer email in shorter than 5 day windows will probaby help too...)
Anyone got any good SERPs checking websites? Ones that'll actualy take my money?
Comments 2 Comments
However, the site is alive and well (if slightly neglected on the email/PayPal side).
Kudo's for Iain for spending the time to talk to me about this; I really appreciate his candidness and understanding. I'm definitely making it a focus to pay a little closer attention to some of my older (and still in-demand!) products.
Bryan