How important Tracking & Monitoring Your SEO Progress
Many people who are new to SEO make the mistake of not tracking their progress. They do this because they think it is too hard, or that there is no point since they can’t see changes in search engine rankings. When you don’t monitor your SEO progress, it makes it difficult to figure out what tactics have been successful and which ones need work. This post will give you tools and tips for monitoring your SEO progress so that you can make sure that all of your efforts are being used effectively!
Do you want to know how your SEO campaign is doing?
Tracking and monitoring your SEO progress can be time-consuming, but it’s worth the effort. Not only will this help you identify what’s working with a campaign and what needs improvement, but it also allows you to objectively demonstrate the value of your services to clients. This ultimately increases client retention rates.
With all this data at your fingertips, however, it can be challenging to determine which metrics are most important for tracking or reviewing regularly. That’s why we created our free SEO tracker app that does all the work for you! It automatically tracks every detail of an SEO campaign so that you don’t have to worry about anything else other than running successful campaigns and generating revenue from them!
This guide will show you how to use SEO tracking as a way of monitoring your website’s performance. You’ll learn about the different ways to track and report on it, including Google Suite tools for in-depth analysis and AgencyAnalytics’ solution for quick reporting.
Is SEO tracking a good idea?
Regardless of the type of campaign you’re running, it’s important to track your SEO. To put it simply, tracking is a process that helps measure performance and progress for any campaign – which can be done before or during its execution depending on the scope of work at hand. Ideally though, if possible, having an SEO strategy in place beforehand will help guide what topics should be covered with your client going into these projects.
Moz’s guide to tracking SEO performance suggests the following questions for clients:
“Can you give us a brief history of your company?”
“What is the monetary value of a qualified lead?”
“What are your most profitable services/products?”
Setting goals for your SEO campaign requires a little creativity. The first step is to set specific, measurable, and achievable objectives with the client that are realistic given their budget and timeline constraints. Before you can actually track any data points on actual results, it’s important to have an idea of how many clicks or impressions each goal will require for them to be considered successful by both parties.
One way we like at Cvent to do this is through setting “easy wins” which allow us to start gaining traction as soon as possible while understanding what our clients want from our work upfront before diving into the project head-on.
Essential SEO Metrics to Track
Search engine optimization is a minefield of data points that can be overwhelming to navigate. It’s not surprising many people shy away from the subject altogether, but those who brave this complex realm will reap rewards with better rankings and more visibility online.
If you’re looking for an exhaustive guide on everything SEO metrics-related then it doesn’t get much better than Lachlan Hardy-Bingham’s in-depth study on the topic: “SEO Metrics Explained”. For now, though we’ll just review a few important ones – keyword research tools like SEMrush offer some great insights into how your competitors are performing as well as providing valuable insight about which keywords have potential profitability, so make sure to check them out!
Organic traffic is one of the strongest signs that your SEO campaign is performing well. Organic search results are displayed in a different order than paid ads and can be viewed with Google Analytics to see how much organic traffic has been brought to your client’s site.
Organic conversion is important. You need to make sure it is going to a good website so the people that are coming are happy. One way to measure the quality of this type of traffic and see whether or not it’s converting into sales for your business would be by tracking how many conversions it has driven. Keep in mind that a “conversion” can mean something different depending on who you are working with – some businesses might consider conversion as when someone makes an online purchase whereas another company may define their ultimate goal as making a phone call to inquire about what product they want more information about.”
Competitor Analysis: Tracking competitors can be just as important of a metric for an SEO campaign. By tracking keywords your competitor is ranking for, their domain authority, and other metrics you will have the opportunity to identify new opportunities in which they rank higher than your client’s site.
To guarantee your SEO campaign is successful, tracking competitors will help guide you in new opportunities. Competitors can be found by following their metrics: domain authority and keywords they rank for. Doing this gives insight on what content might work best or where a potential weakness may exist that needs more attention.
An important part of any SEO campaign is competitor analysis because it reveals information about the type of content needed as well as weaknesses that need addressing if we want to win against our competition! Tracking competitors helps us identify new opportunities including identifying some key sites with high domains authority so we know who’s competing closely with us while also pushing them down through hard-working link-building efforts.
Keyword Rankings: It’s important to stay on top of the target keyword rankings for your clients. A great way is with a keyword tracking tool that monitors keywords rank each day in search engines including Google, Google Maps, and Bing. Daily monitoring will show you which pages can be improved so you don’t miss out on ranking opportunities like other competitors may have taken advantage of while staying diligent about their own SEO efforts!
Monitoring your keyword rankings is one of the best ways to measure success and stay on top of a changing field. This can be done by using an SEO tool that monitors each day’s rank in Google, Bing, and other search engines as they come up with new algorithms constantly. By tracking keywords daily you’ll get a clear snapshot of which pages need improvement so you know how to adjust your strategy for future ranking results!
After identifying a few key metrics to track, let’s look at a few of the Google Suite’s SEO tracking tools. How to track these metrics
SEO Tracking with the Google Suite
Here, we’ll show you how to set up two crucial SEO tracking tools: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics to track organic traffic
For example, one of the essential metrics that was discussed in the previous section is tracking., let’s look at how to track organic traffic in Analytics. To do so first click on “Acquisition > Overview” and then follow this link: https://analytics.google.com/
From within the “Overview> Acquisition>” tab you’ll find a link for “Organic Search”. Clicking there will show more granular data about your performance with each keyword that’s driving traffic directly to your site without going through Google search results pages (the Organic Search).
GA is an incredible tool for understanding all the traffic and data that flows through your website. It can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to look, but luckily it’s easy enough to find a place in GA which works best for you!
The first thing I recommend doing with Google Analytics (GA) is setting up goals so we have some context when analyzing our site’s performance. This will allow us to see what worked well or not-so-well on our site depending on how many of certain pages were visited by visitors during specific time periods.
Isolate organic traffic
GA is a powerful tool for gathering data on the traffic to your site. It allows you to view traffic by channel, which will help mitigate any fears of changes in other channels such as when a paid campaign was halted. Organic traffic remained steady even though total traffic dropped.
Traffic to your site over time
GA is an essential tool for any website owner. With this feature, you can compare the numbers of sessions/users that visited your site in a specific time period to those who visited it at another point during the same day or week. This allows you to determine which days are more popular with users and helps make adjustments to optimize performance on these days so as not to miss out on potential revenue streams!
The number of visits a page has had
Site Content reports in Google Analytics are great for analyzing the performance of a particular page — with data like how many unique visitors it received within a given date range.
Site Content reports on Google Analytics offer valuable information about what content is performing well, and can help you make decisions to improve your website’s overall user experience by understanding which pages need more work or additional optimization.
Traffic from a specified campaign
You can use UTM codes to track what people are clicking on in your marketing campaigns. The code is a simple addition at the end of URL links that help GA (Google Analytics) associate those clicks with specific search engine and social media advertising efforts, which will help you measure their effectiveness more thoroughly.
Google Search Console
Top Queries:
To find the most popular search terms that are bringing people to your website, all you need to do is click on “Performance” in the left tab. From there, select “Queries” and be sure to toggle on “Average CTR” and Average Position.” This will allow you to see how each query ranks for both average clicks per day as well as their respective position within Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Top Pages:
It’s no secret that you want to promote your best content. That said, the Pages tab will allow you to see which posts are getting more eyes and clicks than others so that when it comes time for optimizing a user’s experience with your site, all of their attention can be focused on those pages.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Optimizing your title and meta description in search results can be an extremely telling metric of the success you’ve had with SEO. Google Search Console is a free tool that provides insights on how well optimized your page titles are, as well as what keywords searchers were using to find it. Another great way to improve this process is by taking advantage of Google Tag Manager because it makes tracking specific triggers or web activity much easier than before without having to modify any code whatsoever!
SEO Tracking
Keyword Rank Tracking
Keyword rank tracking is essential for measuring how your SEO efforts pay off over time, but this isn’t something that you want to undertake manually. With tons of factors constantly changing the search engine landscape, a keyword rank tracker can help make sure everything’s on track and keep things running smoothly.
Monitoring Backlinks
Another key metric to track in any link-building campaign are new and lost links for your client’s website. To automate this process, AgencyAnalytics pulls data from the SEO backlink checker Majestic that gives you a detailed profile of each client. On top of just tracking changes in backlinks, this tool can also help you discover which links are the most valuable by tracking more advanced metrics like Trust and Citation Flow. As soon as it’s set up with our automated monitoring service, we then add these statistics to an automatic report system that is sent out daily-so there will never be anything missed!
Site Audits
Site audits are one of the best ways to find early SEO wins that you can deliver to your clients. A site audit tool allows you simply enter a URL, and then it analyzes, discovers, and eliminates some of the most common issues that affect rankings like 404 errors or duplicated images. In particular, broken links rank as one of the top three factors in Google’s ranking algorithm!
Competitor Analysis
With the help of competitor analysis, you can identify new opportunities to outrank your competition. This involves comparing the total number of backlinks for each competitor or their Trust Flow and Citation Flow (among other metrics). Crawling competitors’ sites will also give you ideas on how to modify existing content with a more modern feel to rank higher than current search engine results page (SERPs) rankings.
As we’ve discussed, one of the best ways to demonstrate the value of your agency’s SEO success is by tracking and reporting its performance over time. You can do this through Google Analytics or even with Excel spreadsheets if you want a manual process that requires more work on your end. However, adding these key metrics to custom reports in either an automated fashion (within GA) or manually within excel will save you a lot of trouble when it comes time for analysis!
As many experts have argued before me, there are two major benefits from focusing on analytics – understanding what was done wrong so as not to repeat mistakes going forward and then being able to track progress towards desired goals like increased traffic/rankings.
To get started with SEO tracking, it’s generally recommended to start by adding the key metrics discussed in this article into a custom report or dashboard. By using Google Analytics and search console you can automate your entire process so that all of our work is done for us!
Find out how to track and report the performance of your SEO campaign through Google Analytics. To get started, simply add key metrics from this article into a custom dashboard or report so that you can automate the process!
