It’s commonly said if you can measure something, you can improve also. So tracking and measuring SEO progress is fundamental to improving results. There are numerous search engine ranking factors. Progressing those factors could result in a better position on SERP. But only the right technique and guidelines could track the best progress on the way.
I tried to outline all the SEO progress matrices in this blog. It will help you ensure your SEO tracking and measuring progress are going well.
What is SEO tracking and Measuring?
Tracking SEO is measuring success and how far an initiative has come.
No matter what kind of client website you are trying to rank in search engines, you need to track SEO. Your agency should have an SEO strategy before starting a client’s campaign.
In general, it’s a good idea to ask clients questions that will help guide your work, such as:
What is your best-selling item or service?
How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?
What kinds of questions do prospects ask you?
Before we get into the specific tracking tools, here are a few SEO metrics that you should keep an eye on.
How long does SEO take to Rank?
It’s hard to say how long it will take to see SEO results because there are over 200 ranking factors.
Google says that SEOs have to wait between four months and a year to see results. SEO has a lot of parts, such as auditing your search engine and keeping track of the changes you make.
When you plan SEO activities, you have to think about a lot of things, such as:
Keeping Track of Numbers
Once you’ve decided on your main goal, look at what other metrics you can use to help your site do well. You can get a better idea of how healthy your site is if you measure more (relevant) benchmarks.
Organic Traffic
When people type a question, word, or group of words into a search engine, they get ads and pages that are related to what they were looking for. When people click on your web pages from search engine results, you get free traffic.
You want targeted traffic from organic search, which is why you want it. You’ll get a new subscriber or customer if you can help people solve a problem. It’s also a good way to see how your SEO strategy is going as a whole. When organic search results go up, keyword ranking makes your website more visible.
Check out our Domain Overview and Traffic Analytics tools to see how your website compares to those of your competitors. With both, you can learn more about your organic traffic and how your audience acts.
Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
Do your titles and meta descriptions give a good summary of what each page is about? What does Google Search Console say about their CTR? Are they written in a way that makes people want to click on your result instead of the other URLs that rank higher? What pages could be made better? These are the questions you should keep in mind while tracking and measuring SEO progress. It’s important to crawl your site to find on-page and technical SEO opportunities.
Bounce Rate
Bounced sessions mean that someone came to your site but didn’t look around any further before leaving. They try to lower this metric because visitors think it has something to do with the quality of a website. However, it doesn’t say much about how a user feels about a website.
I’ve seen bounce rates go up on websites for restaurants that have been redesigned and are doing well. The investigation found that people were coming to the site to find out the restaurant’s hours, menu, or address and then returning to visit the restaurant. Scroll depth is a better way to measure the quality of a page or website.
Time Spent on Page
It all comes down to how well your content matches what users want. If someone who is looking for specific information, a product, or a service types a keyword into Google and ends up on your page and stays there for a long time, that means your site met their needs. If your time spent on page score is high, it means that the keywords you used to bring people to your page have met their expectations.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
When you keep an eye on CTR over time, you can often find “quick wins.” If, for example, your page is on the first page and gets a lot of views but has a low CTR, changing its title and/or meta description can make a big difference.
Keyword Rankings
A website’s ranking for the keywords it wants to be found for. You should also add SERP features like featured snippets and people also ask boxes. Ranking for competitive keywords is a nice vanity metric, but it’s often too general and doesn’t convert as well as long-tail keywords.
Crawlability
Are Googlebot and Bingbot able to crawl your main web pages, or does your robots.txt file block them by accident? Does the website have a sitemap.xml file that crawlers can use to find the most important pages? Make sure all are positive to get a positive tracking and measuring SEO progress report.
Indexed pages
Can Google find your most important pages? If you do a search on Google for site:yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com/specific-page, you will find the answer. If some pages are missing from search results, check to see if a meta robots=noindex tag is keeping pages from being indexed and found.
Backlink Check
Any campaign to build links to your client’s site should keep track of new and lost links. With Ahrefs, Majestic, you can keep track of all of your clients’ SEO backlinks, which gives you a full profile of each client.
Tracking more advanced metrics like Trust and Citation Flow can help you figure out which links are the best.
Page Speed
How does your website look in Lighthouse and on mobile devices? Can an image be compressed to make the page load faster? Page speed has become a vital component of SEO progress nowadays.
Content Quality
What does the website have on it right now? Does it fit the needs of the people you want to buy it? Is the content 10 times better than the content on other high-ranking sites? If not, how could you do things differently? You can add things like multimedia, PDFs, guides, audio, and more to your site.
Competitor Analysis
After you have set up keyword tracking, backlink monitoring, and a site audit, another useful tool is to track and study your competitors.
If you know what your closest competitors are ranking for, you can quickly find new opportunities. Here are some examples of how to use it:
Comparing the total number of backlinks for each competitor
Compare Trust Flow and Citation Flow
By crawling your clients’ competitors’ sites, you can get ideas for your clients’ sites.
Final Verdict
SEO is not a rochet science. It needs lots of effort. measuring, testing, and finally a result. So, to make sure a no 1 result you have to track and measure SEO metrics with a caring hand.
