SEO is a highly dynamic process, and it’s important to stay on top of your results. If you’re not tracking data about your efforts—and analyzing it regularly—you’re leaving yourself open to missing out on opportunities for improvement.
In this guide, we’ll share some tips for tracking and analyzing your SEO performance to find the best SEO opportunities to focus on next.
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Why Track and Analyze SEO Performance?
It’s important to track SEO performance because it helps you find opportunities to improve. If you’re not tracking your rankings, you won’t know if they are improving or declining over time, and that’s a big problem. You can face a lot of SEO challenges without proper tracking.
If you don’t have the data to show how well your SEO efforts are going, how can you know if they’re working? The answer is simple: You can’t!
Without data, there’s no way to tell whether or not your tactics are working. You might think something is helping, but without actual numbers, it’s impossible to know how your SEO is performing for sure.
4 Key Metrics to Track SEO Performance
There are different metrics you can use to track to see how your SEO is performing. These include
- Organic Traffic: This allows you to see how many people are visiting your site. You can also track the keywords they’re using to find your website, so you know what they’re looking for.
- Keyword Rankings: These show how high up on search engine results pages (SERPs) your site appears for different keywords. You’ll want to watch these closely because they’ll show whether your SEO efforts are paying off.
- Backlinks: These are external links that point back to your domain name and website content, which helps improve its visibility in search engine results and boost its ranking. You can check these by looking at sites like Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, among others.
- Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who perform an action on your site (e.g., make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter), which tells you how effectively your content is converting people into paying customers or subscribers—and thus determining whether it’s worth continuing to invest resources into developing more content.
Tools for Tracking and Analyzing SEO Performance
In the world of SEO, there are different tools that can help you measure your performance. Here are three of our favorites:
- Google Analytics: Such a tool allows you to track how people interact with your website, what they’re looking for, and how they’re finding it. You can also use it to see where your audience is coming from and what kinds of pages they’re engaging with most often.
- SEMrush: SEMrush is a great tool that allows you to see which keywords are bringing in traffic for your competitors’ websites (and how much). It’s also useful for seeing which keywords you should be targeting if you want more traffic from search engines.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is another great tool that allows you to see which keywords are bringing in traffic for your competitors’ websites (and how much), as well as which ones are bringing in traffic for yours—as well as how much!
9 Best Practices for Tracking and Analyzing SEO Performance
When it comes to SEO, there’s nothing more important than tracking and analyzing your performance.
The good news is that there are plenty of tools available to help you do this. The bad news is that it can be hard to know what data to look for, so we’ve put together a list of best practices for tracking and analyzing your SEO performance.
1. Benchmarks and goal setting
When you’re getting started with SEO, the first thing you should do is set concrete goals. How much traffic do you want? What keywords are important to you?
To answer these questions, you’ll need to know exactly where your business stands currently, what’s working well and what isn’t, and where it needs improvement.
This also means setting benchmarks: How much traffic did we get last month? How many people clicked on our ad? Which keywords were used most often by landing page visitors?
Knowing these pieces of information will help guide future decisions about how much effort should be put into certain activities like creating content or optimizing existing content for search engines. Goal-based Content Marketing can help you a lot.
2. Review your data on a regular basis
You should be regularly reviewing the data you get from your analytics platform, whether that’s Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, or another tool.
You need to keep an eye on how your website is performing in terms of user engagement and conversions—and what kinds of content are most effective at driving these metrics.
3. Improve your performance using insights gained
The more you know about how people engage with your site, the better equipped you’ll be to effect changes that will increase their engagement even more.
This could mean changing the way you present certain types of content, improving the design of certain pages or sections of your site, or making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
4. Keep an eye on the competition
If you’re looking to improve your SEO performance, one of the most important things to do is take a look at what’s working for your competitors. If they’re ranking well, it’s likely that there’s something they’re doing that you can learn from.
Look at their URLs and see if there are any commonalities between them. Are they using certain keywords over and over again? Do they seem to be focusing on certain kinds of content?
By doing so, you will be able to narrow down where you want to focus your efforts when it comes time to create content for your website.
5. Find the best SEO Opportunities In Audience Behavior
One of the best ways to improve your SEO performance is by finding out what audience needs are unmet and then creating content that addresses those needs in an innovative way.
For example, if you notice that people are searching for “how to make [product]” but no one has created an article about how to make [product], then this is a great opportunity for you!
Just make sure that whatever content you create is high quality so people will want to read it and share it with others!
6. Find SEO Opportunities In Content
There are a lot of places where you can find opportunities to improve your SEO performance. The first place is in your content, though. When you have a new piece of content that you’re thinking about publishing, it’s important to make sure that it’s optimized for search.
You should always be looking at your keyword density and the way that it’s structured, as well as what other keywords come up when people are searching for things related to your content.
Two good tools for finding these opportunities are Google Search Console and Ahrefs. There are other tools out there too, but these two are some of the most popular ones among marketers today.
7. Find Marketing Channel Opportunities
Another place where you can find opportunities for improving your SEO performance is through marketing channels like Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads.
These channels provide insights into what kinds of keywords people are using when they look for things related to your business or product, which can help inform how you optimize your site for those keywords in the future (and even how you might structure content around those keywords).
8. Find Product and Service Opportunities
If you’re in the business of making things, there are a lot of opportunities to improve your SEO performance by focusing on your product or service offerings.
Make sure that your company has a strong brand identity and clear product positioning, and make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for.
9. Focus On Your Audience
Your audience is one thing that matters when it comes to SEO performance. If you want more people to visit your website, then it is important that they understand what they are looking for in the first place.
This means that you need to focus on what they want and find out how they search for it online so that you can provide them with content that satisfies their needs and interests in order for them to convert into customers at some point down the line as well!
Final Thoughts
Your SEO strategy is the foundation of your online marketing efforts. It’s the reason you’re spending time and money on all these other channels in the first place.
So, when you’re looking for ways to improve your SEO performance, it makes sense to start with a thorough analysis of what’s already working and what’s not.
And that starts with finding product and service opportunities. What can you do better? Are there gaps in your current offerings that need to be filled? Are there opportunities for cross-selling?
By taking this approach—looking at all aspects of how your business operates—you’ll be able to identify the best possible ways to improve your overall effectiveness as an online presence by making sure everything ties together well.
Author Bio-
Brandon Leibowitz is the founder of SEO Optimizers, a Digital Marketing Agency in Los Angeles, California. He is also the founder of Bosmol.com, a social media news log. He has been involved with search engine optimization and internet marketing since 2007.