Measuring & Tracking SEO

You're doing a ton of work to improve your rankings. But if you don't measure the effort and track it somewhere, you'll be hard-pressed to know where to improve. A combination of benchmarking and careful measurement is the secret to knowing which strategies and tactics work, and when you need to pivot.

The good news is that there are plenty of SEO tools out there to help. But before you decide which tools to use, take some time to think about your goals. Access to the data you need is great, but if you don’t understand why you’re using it or how to apply it, you may fall victim to analysis paralysis.

For most SEOs, progress and goal tracking comes down to a few things: meeting business objectives (i.e. sales), meeting marketing objectives (filling the pipeline), and meeting SEO objectives (increasing search visibility and traffic).

As an SEO, your goal is to get people to a website in order to complete a specific task. And if you want to know if you are reaching that goal, you are going to need to track it using website analytics.

Popular web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, allow you to collect information on how users get to your website and how they interact with your website. This means that when used properly, you can use web analytics to determine if people are coming from your SEO efforts and actually completing the task you want them to.

Search visitor action

One of the first pieces of information you will want to gather from your analytics platform is how many people came to your site from a search engine. This information is easily attainable through the acquisition data provided.

In Google Analytics, this data can be viewed by viewing “Acquisition” reports. These reports will give you an overview of how different marketing channels have performed.

In this instance, you will want to pay attention to the “Organic Search” channel. For each channel, you’ll also be given information about some of the most important metrics around user interaction.

In the Acquisition reports, you will see a comparison of marketing channels by:

• New Users

• Engaged sessions

• Engagement rate

• Engaged sessions per user

• Average engagement time

• Events

• Conversions

• Total revenue

Understanding how users coming from organic channels interact in terms of these metrics can help you make decisions on how to move forward with your SEO strategy. However, you may want more specific data.

To take this analysis a step further, you may want to look at your favorite views with an “Organic Traffic” segment selected.

After applying the segment, you will only see interactions from Organic Traffic. This means any screen you view in analytics for the rest of the session, unless you change your segment selection, you will only see Organic Traffic interaction.

This is really useful for views like “Pages and Screens”, as it allows you to see which pages users are viewing organically and how they interact with your site on each page. This view can really help you understand which pages may need to be optimized for user experience.

If a lot of users view a page organically, but the average engagement time is very low, it’s likely because what was delivered on the page did not meet their needs. It’d be worth taking another look at the SERP and seeing if there are certain types of media you missed, for instance maybe there are videos ranking in the SERP but you don’t provide a video.

It may also be useful to see what the other ranking pages look like. Do they have hero headers above the fold? Or do they get right into the meat of the content? Or, maybe you look at the site speed for that page - could the page be faster? These are just some of the questions your analytics platform could answer for you.

Other popular metrics SEOs may look at in their web analytics platform are scroll depth, behavior flow, load times, site searches, % exits, new users, and engagement rate. To get a better understanding of these metrics, you may consider using the dimensions of pages, landing pages, and device type to find actionable data.

Speaking of actionable data, let’s get to the real stuff - money!

Conversions

Web analytics platforms can, and should, be set up to record conversions on your site. Whether your site is meant to collect payments or encourage people to reach out to you, most any event can be recorded in your analytics platform. Understanding who converts, when, and from where, can help you better understand how your strategy is performing.

Much like with site actions, applying an “Organic Traffic” segment can help you narrow down how traffic from SEO efforts move through conversion on your site. With this segment applied you will be able to see if people who land on product pages organically are more likely to convert than those who land on blog posts. You can also see if there is a difference in the product view to add to cart ratio for organic users.

Again, this information is extremely valuable for benchmarking, testing, and reporting for your SEO strategy. By tracking conversions and understanding where those who convert are coming from, you have a far better chance of proving the value of your work. With conversion tracking properly configured, you will be able to see not only how many people convert from an organic visit, but how many convert from a link you built, or from a citation you claimed.

Aside from the actual decimals and dollar signs, you’re going to want to track the impact of your SEO in, well, SEO terms. This means tracking the KPIs that are relevant to SEO in a broader sense.

One of the most referred to metrics in SEO is rank. At the core of SEO, it seems the major “reward” from search engines is an increase in rankings. If you make Bing happy by following their best practices as an SEO, you will go up in the rankings. This may lead to more traffic or more conversions, but Bing cannot guarantee that, they can simply show your site sooner and/or more often.

Tracking how often your site is showing in the SERPs is referred to as search visibility. This is a secondary KPI of SEO. Not only do we want to show up early, but we also want to show up for all relevant keywords any time they are searched, right? Luckily, search engines understand that these are two of the metrics we are about the most and have created free tools we can use to track them.

Webmaster Tools

Most search engines offer Webmaster tools. Bing has Bing Webmaster Tools and Google has Search Console. These tools show site owners how they have performed in the SERPs for their respective search engines.

The ranking and visibility data gathered by these tools are rather bland. You only receive average position, impressions, clicks, and click-through rates for your site as a whole as well as for the queries you showed up for. The other data provided is similar to the data you’d find in Google Keyword Planner pertaining to the competition around specific queries.

Though a bit minimal, this data is still helpful if you want to compare data period over period to check for progress. By comparing time periods you can see metrics are increasing or decreasing the way you had hoped.

For this specific query, you can see that all of our metrics moved in a meaningful way. We had far more clicks, a few more impressions, a much higher CTR, and a higher average position. This lets us know our strategy is working. Had one or more of the metrics moved in a different direction, we would have had to reevaluate our current strategy.

Paid Tools

The information gathered in Webmaster Tools is valuable, but it is extremely limited. You don’t get a true metric for search visibility and you cannot track your rankings for keywords you don’t get an impression for (which may not seem like a big deal, but ranking 83 is better than ranking 101 and it’d be nice to know how we are progressing).

Investing in a keyword tracking tool will be necessary for a better understanding of the performance of your overall SEO strategy. By investing in a keyword tracking tool you are able to specify your target keywords and track the progress of your strategy as a whole as opposed to tracking on a keyword by keyword basis.

For example, with Moz Pro you are able to select the keywords you are targeting and add them to your campaign. Once selected, Moz will run weekly reports on the progress of your overall campaign. Each week you will receive stats on your overall search visibility, ranking distribution, and ranking movement.

Outside of ranking and visibility, there are an array of other keyword metrics that can be tracked. Search engines have changed drastically through the years and no longer serve ten blue links on the SERP. Today we see knowledge graphs, videos, featured snippets, ads, and more on the SERPs. Because of this, we are forced to track more than just our rankings for specific keywords.

Imagine this – you rank fourth for a keyword and you assume that’s pretty good. You’re definitely on page one and likely pretty close to the top.

Well, that may not be true exactly. For certain queries, there may be ads, then a local pack, and then three listings above you. This could result in quite a bit of scrolling before your listing is ever seen.

Today, SEOs must track not only their ranking and visibility, but they must also track SERP features, organic CTR, clicks, and rank distribution. This can help SEOs get a better idea of how their listings are performing on the SERP and whether or not they are bringing value to their client.

Other than rankings and visibility, many paid tools can help SEOs track how they show up for individual keywords and what the value of showing up in the SERP actually is.

Traffic Value

Paid tools are able to tell you the estimated value of the traffic driven by traffic from specific keywords. This is the result of estimating traffic from a specific keyword through monthly search volume, the organic CTR, or using the actual traffic counts when connected to analytics tools, and multiplying it by the estimated average CPC.

For instance, a keyword with 1,000 searches per month, an organic CTR of 80%, an average CPC of $1.50, and we rank first for the query, the calculation may look like this:

(1,000 * .8)*.9 (average CTR for rank 1) * 1.5 = $1,080/ mo

Obviously you aren’t going to want to do that math yourself for every keyword, so that’s where these tools can really be beneficial and do the heavy lifting for you.

SERP Features

As we talked about before, SERPs are far different today than they were years ago. Instead of 10 blue links, SERPs are full of rich features that can also drive awareness or traffic to your website. Now, tracking these features are a bit tricky as search engines are constantly testing different SERP features for keywords.

Due to these constant changes, it’s nice to be able to track SERP feature ownership over time. Paid tools such as Moz Pro can allow you to track which features were present and which features you own over time. This can help you get a better understanding of your true SERP visibility for specific keywords.

This is also a useful tool for creating a strategy for specific keywords. Understanding what features are present on certain SERPs allows you to create content that is inline with the present features. For instance, if videos are always present on a certain keyword SERP and you don’t have any available video content regarding that query – it might be time to make some!

Honestly, there are so many ways to track the success of your SEO campaigns. But you’re only going to get that data if you have the right tools and systems set up. So take the time to think about your goals, how you want to measure them, and which tools can provide you that information, then go set it up.

When it comes time to prove value or prove that you’re on the right track, you’ll be happy you have the data to do so.

Next Up: Working in SEO

Practical tips for growing your SEO career.

This chapter on Measuring & Tracking SEO was written by Brie Anderson.