DIY SEO 14: Tracking Your Success
By Kurt Steinbrueck
July 20, 2011 
4 Comments
You have begun to optimize your website, but we can’t just optimize and hope for the best. Well, I guess technically you could, but it’s not a good idea. Instead, you need to track the effects of your SEO to see what’s working and what isn’t.
It’s important to see the success (or lack there of) of the SEO work you are doing for a few reasons:
- Things don’t always turn out how you want. We’ve done a lot of research, but all the research in the world can’t produce a perfect result. There will always be keywords which ended up being too competitive or keywords which don’t bring the traffic you want. You need to know that so you can adjust.
- Success creates motivation. SEO work isn’t always the most exciting work. It helps to see that what you are doing is having a demonstative effect on your website and your ministry or business.
- You need to know your ROI. SEO is a marketing strategy and like all marketing strategies you need to know your ROI (Return On Investment) to know where your time is being best spent. You may find that certain aspects of your SEO work are more productive and others are so non-productive it would better to stop doing them.
In order to track the results of your SEO work, you will need to track several metrics. Each gives you a more complete view of the effects of your work and why those effects are happening.
1. Search Rankings:
The most obvious thing you need to track is how well your website is ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for your targeted keywords. This tells you if the optimization you have done has been effective. You could do this manually, but who has time for that. Thankfully there are several software options out there which can track your search rankings for you:
- Advanced Web Rankings
- Internet Business Promoter
- Mike’s Marketing Tools (free, but very limited)
Advanced Web Rankings and Internet Business Promoter are both paid software, but they are good quality, you can save ranking reports, and you can schedule reports to be updated automatically. If you are a local organization, then I highly recommend Advance Web Rankings. They have a very good search ranking reporter that includes local search results.
2. Inbound links:
While we haven’t gotten to link building yet, it’s something you will need to track; so we might as well get it setup. There are several ways you can track link building campaigns and depending on the method(s) of link building you choose you may choose a different method of tracking, but for now, we just want to get overall figures.
Regardless of the method of link building you eventually choose, having the total number of links to your website and/or specific pages is helpful. For this I recommend Majestic SEO. Majestic SEO crawls the web just like the search engines except they only care about creating a database of link data. Unlike the search engines, Majestic SEO doesn’t mind sharing their specific link data with you. For now you should be fine with just a free account. With their free account, you can run a report that will tell you the total number of links they’ve found to your website or even to a specific URL. You will only need to pay them if eventually you want to get very specific data about the inbound links.
Note: While Majestic SEO does provide probably the most complete link information available, you should note that their link data is from their own crawlers, not data from the search engines. So, they will find links the search engines haven’t found (yet) and they will not have (yet) links that the search engines have found. So, it’s not perfect, but considering that the search engines aren’t giving out this information, this is the next best thing.
3. Analytics:
Analytics allows you to track the visitors to your website. You can see traffic data from your various marketing channels (Ads, Paid search, organic search, emails, etc.), track conversion goals on your website, see which pages of your website are most popular, and much, much more. Regarding SEO, we are able to see how much your SEO efforts increase the traffic to your site. You can also see how much traffic is coming from individual keywords.
There are several analytics solutions out there, but I think you’ll be hard pressed to find anything as good as Google Analytics and Google Analytics is free.
Begin Tracking
For right now we just want to get things setup and tracking. So, go ahead and choose the search ranking reporting option you like best and get it setup. Then setup the software to run a report (or reports) for your target keywords. It’s best to do this before you complete the optimization of your website or immediately after. This way you can see where you were ranked before the optimization and thus see the improvements you received from optimizing your website. If you decide to get software that has a scheduler, I recommend setting up software to automatically update the reports at least once a month. I wouldn’t have the reports running more often than weekly.
As those search ranking reports are running, go setup an account at Majestic SEO and create some free reports. These reports will give you an idea of how many links you have out there and give you a baseline from which to move forward.
Finally, setup an account with Google Analytics and add the tracking code to your website. If your website has specific conversion points (e.g. A sales thank you page, a contact thank you page, etc.) go ahead and setup those as goals in Google Analytics. Knowing what sources are giving you traffic is good, but knowing what sources are leading to the most conversions is even better.
Additional Notes and Tips:
Today’s Tasks:
- Choose a search ranking report option
- Run search ranking reports for your targeted keywords
- Create an account at Majestic SEO account
- Run a link report in Majestic SEO
- Create an account in Google Analytics
- Add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website
- Setup goals in Google Analytics (optional)
Photo by trackranger and gerlos
What tracking do you do for your website?
Do you have another tracking method that you use?
DIY SEO 13: Optimizing Your Web Pages <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #15: Becoming More Competitive
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