Do you want to be sure your SEO progress is on track?
If you’re in the process of starting a blog or website, or if you’re a business owner who wants to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine optimization, you might want to consider doing some research on how to track your SEO progress to make sure your SEO is on track.
This article will go into how to track and analyze your SEO progress which will help you decide what to focus on next.
Without further blah…blah… let’s dive into it.
What is SEO Progress Tracking?
There are a lot of misconceptions about what SEO progress tracking actually means.
In reality, the term means anything from simply monitoring website traffic to collecting data to compare against a benchmark or goal.
Tracking is beneficial for both newer webmasters who may not know what to look for in order to measure their success and veteran marketers who want a more in-depth analysis.
The importance of SEO progress tracking cannot be understated. Tracking your progress will help you see the many changes in keyword rankings, backlinks, and other metrics to direct future campaigns.
It can also help when it comes to deciding what techniques are working best for your website so that you can increase the priority of that technique in the future.
With all this information in mind, it’s time to take a look at how you can start tracking your SEO progress If you haven’t already.
How to track your SEO progress?
Tracking your SEO progress can be key to understanding what you are doing right and what you can change to make things better.
So, how do you track it?
You may know that several tools are available for monitoring your SEO marketing efforts, including Google’s most popular tools, Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
There are many tutorials on how to use them and all the techy stuff. But, you need to know what you should track using these tools.
So, first, you need to know what to track.
When we talk about tracking your SEO progress, two things come to mind. One is site ranking on search engines, and another is website traffic.
But, it’s not limited to those two things only. There are so many things you can track and use to measure your results depending upon your goals.
As you know, there are two types of SEO Activities, Onsite or On-page and Offsite or Off-Page. I have divided SEO tracking into 3 different types so you can easily understand what to track depending on your SEO goals.
SEO Progress Tracking: Onsite, Offsite, and Competitor Analysis
Understanding the Progress of SEO can be integral to understanding your SEO strategy and goals.
SEO can be difficult to measure, but I have divided the SEO Progress into 3 parts for easy understanding and tracking.
1) Onsite progress includes site-related metrics such as site speed, your content, and bounce rate.
2) Offsite progress includes industry-related metrics such as traffic, backlinks, and search engine rankings.
3) Competitor analysis to know how your SEO performance is compared to your competitors and what you need to improve to beat your competitors.
Let’s look into all three in more detail.
Onsite Progress:
Technology changes almost every day, and so does SEO. To rank consistently, you need to make sure your website uses the latest technology, design, and other aspects that affect your rankings.
For example, if you have a website built with WordPress CMS, you need to regularly maintain the site with many updates going on in Themes or Plugins or WordPress itself.
If you don’t, it may break some of the things that are vital for SEO. E.g. Page Speed, Sitemap, Redirects and many more things.
If such things happen, you may lose all your work for your website. Onsite Progress checking to make sure that your website is SEO friendly or not.
Don’t worry, though. Onsite progress is easy to track, and since you have full control over it, you can make immediate changes and save your site’s ranking.
I have listed down some of the most important things you need to keep track of and keep improving.
1) Load Speed
Poor load times can significantly limit the success of your SEO efforts. In fact, Google is such a staunch supporter of page speed that it uses it as a ranking factor.
On the other hand, many factors can negatively impact a site’s speed, including images, content, and scripts. With this in mind, how do you know if you’re improving your load time?
You can Use these 5 Page Speed Test Tools to check your current website speed and know how you can improve it further.
2) Content
What will you rank for if you don’t have content on your website?
Content is needed if you want people and Google to find your website in the sea of the internet. You might be confused about how can you track your SEO performance with content?
It’s not rocket science to understand that you need content to rank for any keyword. So, the most basic thing you should ask yourself is…
Do you have enough content on your website?
Does it cover all areas of your business?
If not, consider adding more content. If you already have enough content, make sure it’s up-to-date and error-free. Google always tries to deliver up-to-date content to its users(your potential customers) So, if your content is not updated, it might be losing the rankings.
If it doesn’t cover all areas of your business, you will know what needs to be improved and worked upon.
3) Bounce Rate
In most cases, visitors to a website will turn away from the page within a few seconds if they are not able to find what they were searching for or if they experience a technical problem.
The percentage of visitors that leave your site after only one visit is known as the “bounce rate.”
Tracking bounce rates can be a valuable tool for marketers because it can illustrate how well their SEO efforts are going and where they need to focus more attention.
Suppose you find out that you have a high bounce rate. You can easily analyze user behaviour on your website and find out what is causing your visitors to turn away.
Is it because of your load speed? Or because of your site design or because of the content? If you identify this, you will know what you need to improve your SEO Results.
Offsite Progress:
Similar to Onsite things, in Offsite or Off-Page SEO, marketers perform some activities to improve the website’s traffic, ranking, and authority. There are many techniques and tricks available to improve offsite SEO.
To track the effects of those offsite activities is not as easy as tracking the onsite progress. Cause it’s not completely in your hand. Yes, you do have some control over which techniques to employ, but you can’t control the results of those techniques.
There are some tools available that will help you to do so. They are not completely accurate, but at least you can get the idea about where you are at currently and if you are improving your SEO or not.
There are so many different things you can track in offsite progress. But, I have cut it down to 3 main things for you guys.
1) Backlinks
Google is the most popular and primary search engine that most people use to search for anything. Google is also a benchmark tool most people use to determine search engine rankings.
Google looks at a number of factors when determining how to rank a site, most importantly the number and quality of backlinks pointing to it.
One of the most popular ways to track your SEO Progress is to analyze backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your website that originate from other websites.
By analyzing these links, you can see which sites are linking to you frequently and which content on your site is being shared with others. You can also find what type of content is more popular based on the number of backlinks.
But, one thing that you need to keep in mind is a number is just a number in the case of backlinks. Your backlinks must be relevant for them to help improve your ranking.
2) Ranking
For many beginner digital marketers, it’s not easy to accurately track their SEO Progress. They only understand one thing in SEO, and that is where their or their client’s website is ranking for particular keywords.
The ranking is the most visible and prominent signal to know if your SEO techniques are working or not. This is also the easiest way to track your SEO progress.
Many tools will help you to keep track of your rankings. If you are confused about which tool to choose for tracking your keywords, you can check these best keyword tracking tools.
If your ranking is improving, then that means you are making good progress in SEO. If not, then you know that you will need to put more work into it. By doing regular progress checks, You can identify what type of SEO Keywords you should work on and improve to grow your business.
3) Traffic
SEO can be difficult to measure, but traffic is one of the best measurements for your SEO success.
Traffic is the number of visitors that come to your website, which you can track by looking at your web analytics reports.
There are two reports that will help you measure progress with traffic: the first report is called “Keywords.” The keyword report lists all of the keywords that led people to your site and lets you know how many visitors came from those keywords.
And the second one is called “Source/Medium”. Using web analytics will help you to know where your website visitors are coming from.
The most popular tool to track your website’s traffic is Google Analytics. You might need to invest some money in paid tools to track your rankings, but Google Analytics is completely free, so it’s way easier to track your site’s traffic.
Competitors Analysis:
The SEO industry is becoming increasingly competitive, and it isn’t easy to know if you’re improving your SEO efforts without evidence.
Plus, if you want to keep tabs on your SEO progress, it’s important to monitor competitors’ progress as well.
The best way to measure your progress is by analyzing your competitors. A competitive analysis will allow you to assess how your site stacks up against the competition.
You should do some research to know the answers to questions like…
What are their SEO strategies?
What keywords do they rank for?
How do they compare to you in terms of traffic, time on site, bounce rate, and so on?
Or you can simply compare your Onsite and Offsite progress with your competitors.
You might not be able to get the most accurate data of your competitors. But, some tools are available that will help you spy on your competitors. Spyfu is one of them. There are others too.
Doing regular competitor analysis will tell you what you need to do to steal your competitors’ rankings. (monthly is best)
Most Important SEO KPIs
Now you know the most important things to track to know your SEO progress. But, if you are looking for more, I have created the list of Most Important KPIs to track in SEO.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it’s important to track your SEO progress, but it is also important not to obsess over the numbers. Tracking can tell you what is working and what isn’t, which helps you make more informed decisions. Tracking your SEO progress will help you make more informed decisions about your SEO strategy because it lets you know what’s working and what isn’t.
Many tools claim to be an all in one SEO solution you will never need. But, You should use a combination of tools and strategies for tracking your SEO progress. A combination of tools and strategies will help you to track your SEO progress. Tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Webmaster Tools can help you with gauging the performance of your website. You may also want to use a tool like SEMrush or Moz for keyword research and ranking tracking.
Let me know which tools you are using and recommend for tracking SEO progress.
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