One of the most important but overlooked aspects of any SEO effort is the monitoring part. How do you know if your SEO is working properly? Is your SEO strategy the right one? These and many more questions could be the difference in your business’s growth. We often talk about the best SEO strategies and how to implement them. One item that shouldn’t be neglected is how to monitor SEO.
What Parts of SEO Should You Monitor
The easy answer to this question is all parts of SEO should be monitored. I will tell you which parts of SEO you should focus on the most and why.
- Rankings – This sort of goes without saying but if you don’t know where you are ranking for your keywords then how will you get you potential clients and customers to your website?
- Website Traffic – If you are ranking for the keywords you want then the traffic should be following suite. If you have the right keyword strategy and ranking but the traffic isn’t coming then you can work backwards to find out why.
- Top Pages – It’s always good to know what are the top performing pages on your website. Chances are they either rank well in the search engines or you have a clear path to those pages on your website. If you have a page that is performing well its also important to make sure the content on that page is up to date.
- Behavior Flow – Finding out what actions users are taking on your site could make all the difference. What page are they landing on? What page are they going to after that? Are they contacting you or bouncing?
- Website Health – Critical errors on your website can be ranking killers! Make sure you are monitoring how clean your website is and don’t leave it to chance.
- Conversions – Most business owners don’t have time to track where all their leads come from. How can you know if your SEO efforts are working if you don’t know how many leads it is producing?
SEO Monitoring Tools
Although the 6 parts of SEO seem daunting to monitor, you can wrap up about half of them into one tool. Google analytics can track everything on your website from conversions, to traffic to behavior flow. For tracking rankings and top pages, Ahrefs can be a very useful tool. Screaming frog has been the industry leading website crawler for years now. There are some useful tools that can bundle all of these monitoring tools into one platform. Not only do DIY digital marketers use them but a good SEO company should be using one as well.
Tracking Your SEO Matters
The general rule of thumb is if you can measure something then you can improve it. SEO should be looked at the same way. A good SEO company will track and measure everything in and around your campaign.
