Tracking your SEO efforts

Hopefully by now, we’ve got a list of keywords we’re targeting and we’ve used this information to influence the content that we have on our website. So how do we actually measure the effectiveness of our efforts?

There are three tools that we will look at today that will help us ensure that we are constantly measuring and monitoring our SEO progress.

The first tool that is a must have for every webmaster is Google Analytics. If you are using a popular CMS like WordPress or Joomla, then this is as easy as setting up your Google Analytics account at https://www.google.com/analytics/ and inserting your GA code into your website settings.

GA gives you the ability to monitor the ups and down of your site traffic, where your visitors are coming from and your most popular pages, among the hundreds of its other uses. With eCommerce tracking, we are even able to attribute sales to the actual keywords that brought them.

The second tool that we need is Google Webmaster Tools. With Webmaster Tools, you can find out what the click-through is on the keywords that are driving traffic to your website, what percentage of the total impressions on a keyword that you’re getting and what links that are pointing to your site that have been indexed by Google.

Finally, try to keep a weekly record in a spreadsheet  of your website’s ranking for all the keywords that you are targeting in your list. In order to do this, you can use the Seobook Firefox rank checker plugin which requires you to install the Mozilla Firefox Browser to use.

Keeping a regular record of your progression through the ranking positions is crucial to ensure that you are able to notice any trends or improvements that you may or may not be aware of. Also, it helps you to differentiate traffic that comes from increase rankings (link building, etc) from traffic that comes from increased click-through (meta descriptions/titles).