SEO means working with a large amount of data. A single website can have even up to thousands of subpages, key words, internal links. If it’s operating in a competitive industry, it needs external links from thousands of domains. And what if you’re optimizing many websites? You end up with some real Big Data.
Let’s add the Google algorithm variability, unforeseen actions of the competitors, disappearing backlinks. How do you control all of this?
Photo by Luke Chesser from Unsplash
The market doesn’t like it when nothing’s happening, and it’s no different in the SEO industry. All features and indicators relevant from the perspective of SEO can be monitored with the application of specialized tools. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a one single tool to monitor everything. But, with the help of literally just a few apps, you can keep track of everything that’s important. You can also combine the data from several sources – but we’ll talk about it more later.
The monitoring services ensure that which is most important – which means:
The fact that you own a website (or your customer owns it) and you have access to the CMS and all of the configurations doesn’t mean that you know everything there’s to know about it. It’s very easy for you to miss important problems which affect not only the SEO.
Google Analytics
You surely observe the external results of your actions, but observing isn’t the same as monitoring. It’s good practice to regularly check the reports and to receive alerts at key moments – instead of looking at the results all the time.
Google Search Console
The most important tool to track the effects of the SEO activities is the above-mentioned Google Search Console. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer configurable alerts – notifying, for example, about a decline in the SERP positions. Of course, GSC does send various types of alerts, but it does it in an entirely independent way.
Google Analytics is also very important – or alternatively, any other package used for tracking traffic and user behavior on the website. You can define your own alerts and get notifications here, when something unusual happens to the traffic on your website.
Majestic is a source of very valuable data regarding a SEO-optimized website – this including the links leading to it – it has its own index built in exactly the same way as the Google index.
Some of the advanced SEO platforms – like OnCrawl for example – offer continuous monitoring of the overall health of a website. The service tracks various metrics collected by crawling and log analysis.
Services such as Super Monitoring are used for on-site monitoring – in particular within the scope of availability, speed and the correct functioning of websites. They test the website even several thousand times a day for various irregularities, which they detect, record and report.
Super Monitoring
Position monitoring in the search results can be handled, to a certain extent, via the Google Search Console. However, the possibilities are limited here – and we’re missing the above-mentioned alerts. Majestic and OnCrawl also come to the rescue here with their rank trackers.
As a result of the above, you need at least four tools to be able to fully monitor the SEO. If you configure the alerts in all of them, you’ll protect yourself against missing any important changes in the situation of the positioned website.
But what about the reports? Logging into several different applications day by day and comparing the data in separate windows is torture.
Source: SEO Reporting Dashboard – by Windsor.ai
Fortunately, most of the monitoring applications share their data via API – and you can combine several data sources in “dashboard” type solutions. Google Data Studio is the most well-known one. Interestingly enough, you can connect to it data from sources not offering API – e.g. directly to a database. Owing to this, your key indicator dashboard may also include information from the website itself.