Chapter 6
Tracking & Analytics
Is it SEO working?
One of the most crucial parts of the SEO process is tracking everything that we’ve gone over throughout this guide—things like keyword rankings, click-through rates, and backlink authority (to name just a few).
Without tracking, you’ll never know what is or (more importantly) isn’t working. That’s why it’s essential to set up some sort of analytics that you will use to track your SEO efforts. These analytics will help you determine whether you should ramp up your current efforts or pivot entirely toward something new. They’ll make it easy for you to channel your time and energy in the right direction, instead of wasting resources on tactics that repeatedly don’t work.
Helpful SEO Tools and Resources
There are plenty of tools available that can monitor your keyword rankings or rank the overall SEO of your page. One that we’ve mentioned plenty of times throughout this guide is Semrush. This is a personal favorite of ours at SocialSurge Marketing due to its user-friendliness, the ease with which it breaks down information, and the helpful suggestions it provides.
There are a lot of other tools you can and should be using too, such as:
Google Search Console
A free tool from Google that helps you optimize and monitor your website’s presence in Google search results. You can gain insight into site performance, indexing problems, keywords that are driving traffic, backlink data, and more to help troubleshoot issues and improve your SEO.
Google Analytics
A free tool from Google that tracks and reports website traffic easily. You can get insights into user behavior on your site, how they are getting to your site, and more. Additionally, you can set events and key events to measure website and business performance. Currently, it is Google Analytics 4.
Yoast
A WordPress plugin that we recommend to everyone. It helps with on-page SEO by giving you suggestions for your titles, descriptions, and copy, all right within your WordPress dashboard.
PageSpeed Insights
Another free tool from Google. This one exists to measure web performance and to try and help if it’s not quite up to par.
Lighthouse
A free tool from Google to test how easily someone can navigate through the mobile-optimized version of your website.
MozBar
A plugin, that can be easily turned on or off, which constantly shows you data about the Page Authority, Domain Authority, Brand Authority, and backlinks.
Semrush
A tool that can do many things! It can help you analyze website traffic (but use Google Analytics if you can), provide a domain overview (a summary of key information about your website), break down keyword rankings, perform SEO site auditing, and much more!
Google Tag Manager
A free tool from Google that makes it easy to add and manage your website tags like tracking codes and scripts, without modifying code. It also works well with Google Analytics since you can set up unique events and much more to help with tracking these unique analytics.
Once you’ve started to get some traffic to your website (thanks to our expert SEO tips and subsequent tracking) you’ll want to figure out exactly how all this is benefiting your business. This is where setting KPIs comes into play.
Setting KPIs
KPIs (key performance indicators) are quantifiable metrics that measure progress towards a goal. They aren’t going to be the same for everyone, so it’s important to define early on what is important to your business. Do you want to get more leads? That’s great! Conversions are a great way to track that. Is overall brand awareness what you’re looking for? Awesome! Then tracking relevant website traffic should be a top goal for you.
You may need some guidance before you can make any decisions about what really is important to you in regards to your SEO, and what can realistically be tracked. Here are some common website metrics businesses use to track KPIs.
Users
A user is a person browsing your website. One user can view as many or as few pages on your website as they want. However, it’s important to note that even if the user comes back to your website ten days in a row, Google Analytics will only count them as one user in your date range.
Average Engagement Time
This is the average time that users are spending on your website where they are truly engaged. Instead of someone just being idle on your site and you thinking it’s a “good” user (like average session duration did), this only triggers if they are in focus on your website and truly navigating/using it.
Session Key Event Rate
Your session key event rate is the amount of user sessions that triggered one of your predefined key events. The formula is the total number of key events/number of sessions = session key event rate.
Key Events
A key event is an action or interaction that you defined as “important” that a user does on your website. These can be whatever you want them to be but we recommend setting up things that are truly important like form fill-outs, “get demo” button clicks, and actions like that.
Pages Per Visit
An overview showing the average number of pages a user views during a single session. If a user is looking at multiple pages, it normally means they have some intent, but at times it can mean things are too hard to find. If you have a high page per visit but low key event rate, look to simplify the user journey.
Exit Rate
Exit rate gives you the percentage of users that are leaving the site on that specific page. Of course, for contact pages or similar pages, this is a good thing if they convert, but if there are other pages in the user journey seeing a high exit rate, it might be worth looking at why that might be.
How to Analyze KPIs
Get familiar with Google Analytics, because this is where you’re going to be analyzing and tracking the above-mentioned metrics. Thanks to the ability to easily set timeframes in Google Analytics, you can really hone in on where you started your SEO efforts and see the progress from there. To better understand how to use the free tool, we have a few different GA4 guides on how to utilize Google Analytics since it can be tough when you’re just starting.
Those guides include:
It’s important to keep in mind that SEO efforts are not something you’re going to see results for overnight. It’s a constant task that you have to work toward and keep in the back of your mind while creating new content.
SEO might seem overwhelming, but if you equip yourself with the information we’ve provided, then you should be more than prepared to take on the scary world of search engines. We recommend that you try to hit all of the key points that we’ve laid out in this guide.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us today! One of the SEO experts on our team would be happy to help you out.
Good luck on your journey toward high-performance SEO!
Frequently Asked Questions
When it comes to measuring SEO, while there are many different metrics to track, the most important ones to pay attention to are things like organic metrics, keyword rankings, key event rates, backlinks (both quantity and quality), and page load speed.
A good keyword ranking is typically one that falls between 1 and 10 (including SERP features)—anything above that is not usually something to be celebrated. By 1 through 10 (or SERP feature), we mean your website appears within the first 10 organic results on a search engine page. People tend to stay within the first results page when looking for information, so that’s where you want to end up. (Note: there aren’t always 10 organic listings on a search due to sponsored (paid) links)
We recommend checking your keyword rankings at least once a week in order to have a good understanding of how your website is performing. However, the frequency can change depending on the competitiveness of your keywords or your unique business needs. It is important to not make any drastic changes during Google Search Updates since rankings can change drastically and then go back to normal.
Page load speed is how quickly it takes a webpage to fully load and become visible on a user’s device. Faster page load speeds are generally considered to be a better user experience and are therefore important for a higher SEO ranking.
On-page tracking involves analyzing metrics on your website that you can control, things such as quality of content, keyword usage, and a meta description, while off-page tracking involves analyzing metrics that you can’t control as easily, such as getting backlinks from other websites, establishing credibility on SERP, and building brand mentions. Both are important to the success of your business.
When your website is not optimized for mobile or tablet users, it can significantly impact your SEO rankings and cause you to appear lower on the SERP. Google often conducts mobile-first indexing in order to determine the quality of the user experience on different devices. It is important to look at the split of devices in Google Analytics to see what device your users use the most when on your site to prioritize that type of view.