Early on in this course, you learned that search engines like Google change their search algorithms frequently. Because of these changes, constantly measuring and tracking your SEO efforts is essential. If you don’t track before and after results, how do you know if your SEO is paying off? Besides, what works this year may not work as well next year. By monitoring your SEO work you discover what is working, as well as what is not, and can direct your attention appropriately.

What to Track

Keyword research and on-site optimization will keep the search engines happy, sending you a constant stream of free traffic. The simplest way to do this is to keep an SEO log. What should you be tracking? Measuring the following metrics will ensure your SEO hard work pays off, delivering the results you are looking for.

Track your traffic sources

Where did your traffic come from? As a percentage of overall traffic, people reach your website through 1) search engines, 2) by being referred from other web pages, and 3) by direct navigation. Direct navigation means they manually enter a web address for one of the pages on your site. Referral traffic comes from inbound links you have created on other sites, blogs, social media accounts, and web pages.

The traffic you receive from internet search engines is obviously important as it relates to your SEO work. Record how many search engine visitors you receive each month, in relation to separate keywords and phrases. Over time you will see the number of your visitors increase, decrease, or stay the same, as you make changes to your SEO plan.

Separate Your Traffic by Search Engine

Different SEO strategies are rewarded in different ways by internet search engines. You may find that a keyword that ranks very well for you with Google doesn’t rank as well with Bing, and vice versa. Approximately 90% of your web visitors will come from Google and Bing, and you need to know how much traffic you receive from each of those and any other search engines.

Define Search for Keywords

Your keyword research has revealed words and phrases you are going to be targeting in your search engine optimization efforts. Each one of those phrases will deliver different amounts of search engine traffic. Software that analyzes your traffic will list search results, and separate that information by different keyword phrases.

Conversion Rates

How much of your traffic leads to sales? How many web visitors sign up for your email list? It is important to know what percentage of traffic does what you want them to do. By tracking and measuring conversion rates according to different keyword phrases, you can direct your content creation toward the keywords that deliver the highest converting traffic.

Links

Backlinks are one of the most important search engine metrics you should track. This is because they continue, year after year, to be highly regarded by the search engines. You should always track the backlinks pointing to your web properties. In addition to quantity, you should measure the quality of these important backlinks. This is revealed by URL ratings that SEO tracking software provides.

Time On-Site

How long does the average visitor stay on your site? If your bounce rate is high, meaning most of your visitors leave immediately after reaching your site, search engines believe this is because your content is of low quality, and not relevant to a particular search term or phrase.

Tools to Help You Track Your Results

There are several excellent websites and pieces of software that measure and record important search engine metrics. You should definitely have a Google Analytics account, and the same is true with Bing Webmasters.

Those two free tools will give you access to the majority of your search engine traffic, they are user-friendly even for beginners, and they practically tell you what changes you need to make to improve your traffic. The following tools should be considered as complements to Google Analytics and Bing Webmasters.

• WP Stats (for WordPress web properties)
• Yoast
• PiWik
• AwStats
• Yahoo Web Analytics
• Ahrefs
• MajesticSEO
• SEMRush
• WebMeUp