It is easy to improve something if you can monitor it. And this is no different with SEO; you need to monitor your efforts and evaluate them to know where you should improve. It also helps you stay updated with the current trends and enjoy a competitive advantage in your industry.
Also, SEO monitoring helps you avoid what’s not working and focus on what delivers results. Strategically directing your efforts can help you take your business to higher levels. But then, you may not know how to effectively monitor your SEO efforts.
This article looks to simplify SEO monitoring for you. It is a complete guide that focuses on the SEO aspects that require monitoring. It also focuses on the best tips and tricks to help you monitor your SEO. These SEO monitoring insights are worth implementing in 2022.
Here’s what you should know.
Why Should You Monitor Your SEO?
There are various reasons why SEO monitoring matters. Here are six significant reasons why you may need it to thrive in today’s digital marketing world;
● Improve Your SEO Rankings
This is the ultimate goal of keeping track of your SEO. High SERPs rankings come with several benefits. Thus, it helps to invest your time in tracking your efforts to discover your strengths and weaknesses. In the end, you get to improve on your weaknesses and increase your rankings.
● Avoid Penalties
Search engines like Google have set in-house SEO rules. You risk being punished if you do not keep up with the regulations in place. For instance, some links could get considered toxic by the search engine. Including them in your text will affect your SEO. It would be best if you kept monitoring for such.
● Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Every website and business as a whole has its strengths and weaknesses. This is another reason to monitor your SEO as a business owner. You need to know areas that you can strengthen further and where you need to improve. This will help you rank higher on SERPs and increase your organic traffic.
● Monitor the Competition
Another reason to monitor your SEO is that that’s the easiest way to beat competitors. You should be able to outrank your competitors if you are to gain a competitive advantage. SEO monitoring can help you know the areas you can improve to beat your competitors.
● Budget Tracking
Businesses invest a lot in on-and-off page SEO. As a business owner, you expect returns for every amount you invest in SEO. The best way to track and manage your budget is to monitor SEO. The metrics discussed below can help you know if your investment is paying off.
● To Simplify SEO
Using SEO tools makes work easier for website owners. It can be daunting to guess what your competitors are doing. You could end up not improving your business or even hurt your strategy. SEO monitoring with tools makes it possible to keep track of your competitors’ digital strategy.
How Often Should You Monitor Your SEO?
You could be wondering how often you should check your SEO health. Well, there’s no specified period within which you should monitor your SEO. You can choose how often to keep track of your efforts, but it shouldn’t take too long. SEO is dynamic, so you have to keep this period as short as you can.
For instance, as you’ll learn later in this article, keywords come and go. Thus, you should update your content with trending and high-ranking keywords. Also, other content elements like title tags, metadata, etc., get out of fashion. If they do, your content visibility could decline, and that will affect your SEO.
It is best to check your SEO at least twice a month. Or, you can make it once every week if possible. You can use various SEO monitoring tools to check different metrics of your SEO. Also, you can update your blog, website, and social platforms with fresh, SEO-optimized content every time you do that.
SEO Monitoring With Proxies
Using technology tools to monitor your SEO simplifies work. And, an excellent example of a tool that you can use for this is a cheap proxy server. Investing in one makes it easier to track and analyze markets across the globe from the comfort of your home or office.
Datacenter proxies for SEO monitoring gives you international reach like no other. It makes it easy for your traffic to get past security hurdles on websites. For instance, a cheap private proxy can alter your IP address every time you want to scrap a competitor’s website.
That way, the bots deployed to flag web scrapers won’t recognize your IP address. This makes it possible to send as many requests as you want to a website. It also means that you can gather so much competitor data without getting noticed or blocked from a website.
So, how does buying cheap proxies help with SEO monitoring? As we’ll discuss later, tracking your competitors is vital to SEO and digital; marketing growth. It is the best way to tweak your strategy, offer your clients more value, and increase profitability on your website.
A cheap private proxy adds privacy and security to your web scraping strategy. It makes it possible to check your competitors and know their strengths and weaknesses. In the end, beating your competitors in the digital marketing field becomes easier.
It’s worth noting that the proxy vendor you choose matters. They ought to be reliable and trustworthy to increase your chances of success. Otherwise, a vendor that sells your IP address can expose and sell you out. An unreliable one could put you at risk of a costly data breach.
Essential SEO Metrics to Track
There are several SEO metrics that you can track on your website. Although this article won’t cover all of them, it looks into the main metrics that you should include in your plans. Here’s what you should check when keeping track of your SEO efforts.
1. Keyword Rankings
The first metric that you must monitor is your keyword performance. It would help if you watched this because keyword performance changes from time to time. The keywords that help you rank on the first page of search engines today may not help you rank higher for SEO in the future.
It is possible to monitor keywords using a keyword tracking tool. Such a tool will help you monitor your keyword performances on different search engines. It will notify you once the score of your keywords drops. This will then make it easier to stay on top of your digital marketing game.
2. User Experience
User experience is another metric that’s worth keeping an eye on as a business. User feedback on your website impacts your SEO rankings. Remember, search engines aim to only provide users with the best. They may not recommend your website if past users have bad experiences.
Thus, you should often check the experiences users have on your website. The first way to do that is by asking for their feedback. Another way is to try and access the website as a user. The latter is more effective because it gives you a better picture of an ideal user’s experience.
3. Click-through rate (CTR)
Your click-through rate tells you more than how you rank on search engines. It tells you whether your audience likes your products or not. It tells you how often your visitors click on specific pages on your website. This helps you know how the pages compare and where to improve.
Monitoring your CTR often helps ensure that you get returns from every page of your website. It is easy to sell your stock equally when all your web pages are visible to your audience. SEO monitoring is all you need to ensure that it happens effortlessly.
4. Organic Traffic
Digital marketing is a game of numbers; the amount of organic traffic coming to your website matters. More traffic indicates that your SEO campaign is performing well. This makes it vital to constantly keep an eye on your organic traffic as part of SEO monitoring.
There are various tools that you can use to do this effectively. An excellent example is Google Analytics, which can help you keep track of important events on your website. For instance, it can help you track how long users spend on your website, bounce, and conversion rates.
5. Competitor Strategies
Tracking your performance is good but not enough to guarantee you success. The digital marketing world is competitive, and you cannot beat your competitors if you don’t know their strategies. Researching what they do is a critical aspect of competitor monitoring.
It would be best to look at the keywords they are ranking for and how they use them. Also, it helps to check your competitor’s domain authority as well as their digital marketing strategy. All these can give you a clue of the competitor’s strengths and make it easier to beat them on SEO rankings.
6. Organic Conversions
Getting organic traffic onto your website isn’t everything. You need to turn this traffic into conversions to make a profit for your business. The best way to know whether your organic traffic is paying off is by tracking the number of leads who end up buying products on your website.
This can help you know where you lose potential clients on the customer journey. In turn, you can easily change your strategy so that it, for instance, focuses more on customer engagement. This will ensure that you get the desired results from your SEO and digital marketing efforts.
7. Links
According to the Search Engine Journal, links are essential for SEO. But various factors affect the value of links in your content. And, a backlink that’s valuable today may cease to be tomorrow. This can, for instance, be a result of changing customer needs.
Thus, you need to ensure that your keywords answer the user’s questions. You can make this time-consuming process more accessible by using a tool to monitor your keyword performance automatically. That way, you’ll ensure that you use the right keywords and get good rankings.
8. Indexing
Another vital metric to keep an eye on is indexing. It is what determines if your website appears in search results. This is because your website cannot get ranked if it’s not indexed first. It is vital to index every page you would like to appear in search results.
The more pages you have indexed, the better. But then, ensure that you index pages that provide users with the desired value. You can request Google to index any page that you’d like to add to the list. That’s why you should review the pages often to be sure of the pages to index.
9. Social Networks
SEO is not only about your website content; it also includes social media networks. Databox refers to it as social SEO, and it helps improve a business’s visibility. With good SEO, people will easily find your posts and pages then purchase your products.
You need to check the performance of the keywords you’re using on social media. The easiest way to be visible on these platforms is by using trending keywords and hashtags. That will make it easy for people interested in what you sell to find and contact you on social media.
Besides, it would be best to be sure about the images and videos you are using on your social pages. Monitoring will help you know if they conform to SEO best practices. For instance, you should see if they are of the right quality and confirm that they open clearly on all screen sizes.
Conclusion
Well, there’s no doubt that SEO monitoring matters to businesses and website owners. This article has looked into why it is vital today for digital marketers. It has also explored the metrics that you should keep an eye on while monitoring your SEO.
You can, therefore, include these metrics in your SEO strategy. You can then implement them when looking to monitor your SEO efforts and improve on your weaknesses.
