SEO Monitoring: Tips, Tools, and Metrics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential strategy for increasing website traffic as well as your brand authority. The higher and more often you appear in search engine results, the better your website will perform.

This is where SEO monitoring comes in. Once you’ve put together your SEO strategy and started implementing it, you’ll need to keep an eye on your results to make sure it’s actually working.

Read on to learn more about what SEO monitoring entails, nine metrics to track, plus a few tools and tips for making the most out of your optimization strategy.

What is SEO Monitoring?

SEO monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing different metrics and data related to your website’s performance, especially when it comes to where your website stands in search results. 

By consistently monitoring your site’s SEO standings, you’re able to track things like the number of keywords your website ranks for, your organic traffic directly due to search rankings, your growth in website visitors, and more.

If you’re implementing an SEO strategy, monitoring is a key part of ensuring your plan is actually working, as well as finding any changes or adjustments you need to make.

Why Tracking Your SEO is Important

SEO monitoring is important because it helps you understand how effective your website growth strategy is. If you’ve implemented tactics intended to boost your search rankings and increase website traffic, you want to make sure your efforts are actually working.

By tracking your SEO performance, you can understand things like:

• Which keywords you’re able to improve your ranking for
• Which keywords you need to adjust your strategy for
• How much traffic you’re getting as a direct result of your efforts
• If you need to make small or large-scale changes to your strategy

Just like with any digital marketing strategy, you can’t simply “set it and forget it.” Tracking your progress is an essential step to ensure everything you’re doing is working, you’re not wasting time, and your efforts are going to grow your business.

9 SEO Metrics to Monitor

As you start diving into your SEO monitoring plan, let’s cover nine key SEO metrics you should be consistently monitoring. These metrics will help you gauge whether your SEO efforts are working, or if you need to look into adjusting your strategy.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the website visitors who find your site through unpaid search engine results. Because SEO is all about increasing the number of keywords you rank for and how high you rank for them, a jump in organic traffic is a huge indicator of success.

You can find your organic traffic numbers with a website analytics tool like Google Analytics. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition to see where your website traffic is coming from, and how much of it is due to organic search.

Keep an eye on your traffic trends and make sure it’s increasing month-over-month. You also want to make sure your organic search traffic is consistently growing and is a major portion of your total website traffic.

Keyword Rankings

Your keyword rankings refer to the number of keywords or search terms your website ranks for. As you find new keywords to target and create new content, you want to see your keyword rankings steadily increase as well.

Monitor your keyword rankings with an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush (we’ll be talking more about these tools in the next section). 

Backlinks

Backlinks are another metric you can measure using an SEO monitoring tool. Backlinks let you know how many websites are linking back to one of your webpages. The more backlinks your website receives, the more authoritative your domain appears to search engines, increasing the chances that you can rank higher in search results.

Click-Through Rate

Your organic click-through rate (CTR) tells you how many people have clicked on your website after seeing it in search results. You can find this metric using Google Search Console by going to Performance > Search Results and looking at your Average CTR.

You can see your overall CTR or scroll down and see your CTR for each individual keyword, helping you gauge which results generate more interest and clicks than others.

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate refers to the number of visits from organic search results that ended in an action like a free trial sign-up, sale, form fill-out, or subscription. You can track conversions with Google Analytics by setting up “key events” so that you can track them in your GA4 dashboard.

SERP Feature Rate

There are different SERP (search engine results page) features you can aim for, like the featured snippet, People Also Ask answers, or AI overviews. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can tell you how many keywords you’re getting featured in more than a regular results listing. This can increase your click-through rate and organic traffic.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is a metric that tells you how likely your website is to rank in search results. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz (tools that we’ll be diving deeper into shortly) each have their own domain authority or ranking checker that lets you see not only your own domain authority but that of your competitors too.

The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank for search keywords, no matter how high the keyword difficulty is. Your domain authority will sit on a scale of 1 to 100, and the higher your score, the better your authority is.

Exit Pages

Exit pages are pages on your website that visitors tend to leave from. While this could simply be because they’ve gotten what they came for, it’s important to keep an eye out for highly exited pages as they may need optimization or improvement to keep your visitors more engaged.

To view your exit pages, search for the report Top Page title by Exits in the top search bar in Google Analytics. You’ll then be able to see which pages had the most exits over the last week.

This is just a quick view. To get more in-depth, you’ll need to create a custom report in the Explore section of GA4. Click the plus sign to create a new blank report.

From there, follow these steps:

• Under Dimensions, add Page path and screen name 
• Under Metrics, add Views and Exits 
• Double click each added element to add it to the exploration
• Click on Exits in the table to the right of the screen to sort pages by exits

You’ll see a chart like this one, showing you which pages see the most exits:

Bounce Rate

Finally, you’ll also want to take a look at your bounce rate. Bounce rate tells you how many of your website visitors are leaving your site after clicking to a single page and not engaging with any part of your website.

Similar to exit pages, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO strategy isn’t working. But it can point to something like:

• Boring web pages
• Web pages that don’t actually answer their search query
• Broken links
• Outdated content

Average bounce rates vary greatly based on industry, traffic acquisition, device, and more. But in general, your bounce rate shouldn’t be higher than 40-60%. Bounce rates that are too high might mean that your web pages need to be updated to make sure they’re answering the right questions someone searching for your keywords is asking.

5 SEO Monitoring Tools

When monitoring your website’s SEO performance, there are three main tools you’ll need: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and a third-party SEO tool of your choice. We’ll walk through the first two, along with three different options to choose from for the latter.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free Google marketing tool that you can connect to your website to monitor data like clicks and impressions due to your search rankings, your website’s average position in results, and more.

There are three main reports you’ll want to pay attention to throughout your SEO monitoring process:

• Performance report: This report walks you through how your website is performing via SEO, showcasing metrics like each individual page’s SERP positions, clicks, impressions, and your click-through rate (CTR).
• Pages report: This report gives you information about each of your webpages so you can see which pages are indexable or if any of your pages are having technical SEO issues that’s keeping them from ranking.
• Core Web Vitals report: This report coincides with Google’s search algorithm parameters and gives you details on pages that need technical improvements to rank better and provide a better experience for your website visitors.

Get acquainted with Google Search Console, as you’ll become very good friends throughout your SEO monitoring journey.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another completely free Google marketing tool that gives you the most accurate and up-to-date website analytics available. With Google Analytics, you can see real-time website visitors, access data on your traffic, where it’s coming from, how long people are staying, and so much more.

You can also build custom reports and dashboards to get access to even more metrics. Google Analytics is a major part of your website and SEO monitoring, so be sure to get your website connected ASAP so it can start tracking.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a third-party SEO monitoring software that can give you tons of amazing data regarding your website, your competitors websites, and the SERPs. Use this tool to find keywords you can rank for, track your domain authority, check your backlinks, and monitor your page’s rankings.

Ahrefs offers a ton of different tools and reports required to get the full scope of your SEO strategy. Not only is this a great tool for creating an SEO strategy, but it can help you track your results as well.

Pricing: Plans start at $129/month.

Semrush

Semrush is similar to Ahrefs in that it lets you both build and monitor your SEO strategy. Find keywords to rank for, discover which keywords your pages are already ranking for, track where your pages sit in the SERPS (as well as if they’ve increased or dropped in rank), and more.

Semrush also offers a number of free SEO tools you can use to track things like website authority, SERP rankings, keyword stats, and more.

Pricing: Plans start at $139.95/month.

Moz

Finally, we have Moz, another amazing SEO monitoring tool that can help you track all things search engine results pages. Track metrics like domain authority, ranking pages, backlinks, keyword rankings, and more.

Plus, find keyword suggestions, get insight into search intent, and take advantage of tools like the Search Visibility Score to help you find keywords you’re most likely to rank for.

Pricing: Plans start at $49/month.

3 SEO Monitoring Tips

Before we set you off on your SEO monitoring journey, let’s cover a few key tips that will help you keep up with tracking your results and ensuring you’re using them strategically.

Monitor Your Metrics Regularly

Tracking your results is an important part of your SEO strategy, but you don’t want to start obsessing over them and monitoring your metrics every hour of every day. Instead, set a cadence that makes sense.

For example, you might want to check on your keyword rankings weekly or bi-weekly to keep up with changes and address any major drops quickly. But you can put together a process for monitoring your other metrics at the end of each month and put together a report that gives you a bird’s eye view of your performance.

You want to monitor your metrics regularly without becoming a slave to them. Give yourself set times to check in, then use the rest of your time to focus on creating content and implementing other growth strategies.

Build Out a Dashboard or Spreadsheet

To make tracking your performance easier, create a dashboard or spreadsheet that you can easily refer to, input your results, and generate graphs and reports. Building out a template ahead of time can make your monthly tracking process go much more smoothly.

You can create a dashboard within your SEO monitoring or website analytics tool (more on that next) or you can use Excel or Google Sheets to put together a spreadsheet that you update each month with your results.

AgencyAnalytics offers an SEO dashboard that helps you get a quick overview of your performance before you dive deeper using your other tools.

Source

Use the Right Tools

We’ve walked you through five essential SEO monitoring tools, but it’s important for you to still do your own research to find the right tools for your needs and your processes. Tools like Google Analytics (and the aforementioned AgencyAnalytics) can help you create custom reports that showcase your performance.

But SEO monitoring tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz are essential for monitoring your keyword rankings from a single dashboard, rather than having to conduct manual search queries to see where you sit.

Choosing the right arsenal of tools will help you make your SEO monitoring process more seamless so that you can spend more time creating and optimizing your content for even better results.

Adjust Your Strategy Accordingly

Don’t look at your SEO metrics and then do nothing with them. If you see drops in keyword rankings, put together a plan to better optimize those pages, then create a plan or checklist for future pages that you can follow along to ensure they’re completely optimized in a way that maximizes rankability.

SEO tracking is meant to help you get a clearer understanding of what makes your webpages and blog posts rank in search results so that you can get better and better at creating fully optimized content.

Start Monitoring Your SEO Performance

Start boosting your presence in search engines by creating an SEO monitoring process that makes an impact. Link your website to key tracking and analytics tools, put together a schedule for monitoring results, and then use those results to boost your SEO strategy.