Monitoring is vital to a viable Internet marketing strategy and any SEO campaign. Now that you Know Your Goals, have done some Keyword Research and created an SEO Friendly Website, it is time to put some monitoring in place. Monitoring your traffic, your site’s performance, your search positions and those of your competition allows you to make decisions that gain more traffic and sales. It allows you to test and to measure the results of tests. To improve on what is working and to do less of what is not working.
Google Analytics
Probably the most common monitoring is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a freely available analytics package that allows you to track visitors to your site.
Google Analytics can Provide Details on:
- Numbers of visits to your site
- Numbers of sales leads generated
- Where visitors are coming from
- Where sales leads are coming from
- What content is converting to leads
- What search terms and which ads convert to leads
Monitoring Search Positions
Monitoring search positions is important. Keeping a periodic record of ranking for your most important terms is also good. You need to know what is working and what isn’t and that means having a record of changes that you make and having a record of your rankings over time.
With personalisation and social becoming more and more a part of how search engines work, it is not really viable to just check your rankings on your machine by going to Google. There are many 3rd party rank checkers available. They range from free to around €60 a month (usually as part of larger SEO and marketing toolsets). As well as saving you time and effort in checking your results, these tools should avoid you getting a false indication of where you are, based on personalisation.
Monitoring is vital but beware of getting obsessed. If you find yourself checking rankings every hour or so and looking up Google to see if the changes you made have taken effect, you will be wasting your time. Set up proper monitoring. Weekly or monthly is enough for most cases. You may use your monitoring tool to check up more often to monitor a specific change from time to time but don’t get stuck wasting your day. That time could be used getting links or generating fantastic content or fixing problems on your site.
Monitoring Links and Social Mentions
Tracking inbound links to your site and factors like social media mentions is also an important part of your monitoring. Building social mentions, building social reach and building links are all part of the goals of the content marketing we will discuss later in the guide. Monitoring these factors allows you to gauge:
A) the impact your efforts are having in getting more links, more mentions etc. and
B) the impact that links and social reach are having on your search rankings.
Just like with links, more and more social monitoring tools are popping up all the time.
Ongoing Process
SEO is an ongoing process and monitoring from the start is central to getting that process right.
- Try things
- Testing, testing and more testing
- Monitor your results
- Do more of what works
- Change or discontinue what doesn’t
This post is part of our 12 Post SEO Guide, an ongoing series. If you would like to keep up to date you can follow the blog through RSS or follow us on Twitter.
12 Post SEO Guide
- 12 Post SEO Guide
- Know Your Goals - 12 Post SEO Guide #2
- Keyword Research - 12 Post SEO Guide #3
- 15 Steps to a Search Engine Friendly Website - 12 Post SEO Guide #4
- SEO Analytics, Monitoring and Improving - 12 Post SEO Guide #5 (This post)
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Tags: analytics, monitoring, seo guide, serps monitor
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Thanks for your post. SEO and analytics is a great (and perhaps underused) combination.
A useful resource for your readers may be http://www.googleanalyticstest.com. It’s a completely free resource for practical Google Analytics skills testing training, and you can choose from up to 28 categories for your self-test, including Search Engines and SEO.
great blog post. Thanks for sharing it.
There may still be some small businesses that are not using their Google Analytics data, but if you exist out there then the best advice you can take is to start using them right away. If you want to be able to optimise your website better, understand your visitors better and convert more visitors into paying customers then Analytics data are one of your most effective weapons.