Tracking your SEO efforts is just as important as doing SEO in the first place. After all, you need to make sure you continue making progress by increasing the traffic you get from Google. Similarly, it is essential you identify problems with SEO as soon as possible. You can also do this by tracking.
The most commonly used tool to track your SEO progress is Google Analytics. If you don’t currently have this setup, you should do so as soon as possible as it gives you invaluable information on the performance of your website.
The starting point with Google Analytics is to look at the main metrics for your website. To do this, go to Audience > Overview. You should do this on a monthly basis, measuring the difference between each month. It is also worthwhile to compare each month with the same month last year.
The four main metrics are:
So, a user visiting your website three times during a month and accessing four pages per visit will add the following to your stats:
These headline figures are important as they will tell whether overall traffic to your website is up or down. This doesn’t specifically tell you about traffic from search engines, however. You will find that information in another section of Google Analytics.
To find statistics on how people access your website, go to Acquisition > Overview. This will tell you the source of your website traffic, with one of the options being Organic Search, i.e. traffic from Google and other search engines.
Again, you should compare this figure with the previous month and with the same month in the previous year. It is also worthwhile to calculate your monthly average and then compare it to that average as well.
It is also often important to look at individual pages on your website. This could be pages created specifically for SEO purposes, for example. It can also be your main sales pages, i.e. the pages you want people to visit as often as possible.
To find this information, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. This gives you a list of all the pages on your website accessed during the specified time period. The default view orders the pages according to the number of pageviews, with the most popular pages at the top of the list.
To find the traffic level of a specific page, search for it using the search box just above the table.
Google Analytics offers other metrics that are useful to SEO, so it is worthwhile regularly checking these too.
It doesn’t take long to check the above in Google Analytics, but it will help your SEO.
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