Chapter 6

Tracking & Analytics

Is it working?

A very crucial part of a professional SEO’s job is to track everything that we’ve gone over throughout this guide. Keyword rankings, click-through rates, backlink authority, just to name a few.

If you don’t set some type of analytics to track your SEO efforts, you’ll never know not only what is working, and just as importantly, what isn’t working.

There are plenty of tools out there to monitor your keyword rankings and rank the overall SEO of your page. One that we’ve mentioned plenty of times throughout this guide is Semrush. We personally use this tool because of its usability, the way it breaks down the information, and the suggestions it provides. A tool like Semrush will help you:

• Analyze traffic
• Give you a domain overview
• Breakdown keyword rankings
• Audit your site SEO
• And much more!

There are a lot of other tools you can and should be using too:

• Google Search Console – a free tool from Google to help you optimize and manage your content on Google.
• 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.
• Yoast SEO – a WordPress plugin that we recommend to everyone. It helps with on-page SEO by giving you suggestions to your titles, descriptions, and copy, all right within your WordPress dashboard.
• Mobile-Friendly Test – a free tool from Google to test how easily someone can navigate through the mobile-optimized version of your website.
• MozBar – is a plugin, that can be easily turned on or off, which constantly shows you data about the PA, DA, and links of a page.

As you start to make SEO changes to your web pages, make sure to track the progress you’re making and track what hasn’t worked as well. This is a crucial part of SEO because you need to know where you should be spending your time and effort in order to keep improving!

After you’ve started to get some traffic to your website you’ll want to figure out exactly how this is benefiting you. This is where setting KPIs for your business comes into play.

Setting KPIs

Key performance indicators aren’t going to be the same for every business out there. It’s important to define early what is important to your business. Do you want to get more leads? Great! Conversions are a great way to track that. Is overall brand awareness what you’re looking for? Awesome! Tracking relevant website traffic should be a top goal for you.

Maybe you 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:

Users – An individual person browsing your website. One user can view as many or few pages on your website as they want. 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 session duration – This is the average time that all users are spending on your website. For some reason, Google Analytics does not count time for the last page viewed during a session though, so this number can appear a little lower than it actually is.

Pages per visit – An overview showing the average number of pages a user views during a single session.

Bounce rate – When a user only views one single web page and then leaves, they “bounce”. The bounce rate is the percentage of sessions with only a single pageview.

Conversion rate – A conversion can be pretty much whatever you set it to be. Let’s use filling out a form on your website as an example. Total number of conversions/number of unique visits = conversion rate

Location – You’re able to see the geo-location of all of your website users that have cookies turned on while on your website. This can be very useful information to see if you’re hitting the right target market!

Get familiar with Google Analytics, because this is where you’re going to be analyzing and tracking these metrics. You’re able to set timeframes easily in Google Analytics, so you can really hone in where you started your SEO efforts and see the progress from there.

SEO efforts are not something you’re going to see overnight. It’s a constant task that you have to work toward and keep in the back of your mind while creating new content. 

What we recommend doing to get started is to make sure you hit all of the key points that we’ve laid out in this guide. Go through that and as you have questions, feel free to ask them. We have a live chat feature on our website and Eric would love to help you out!