For every Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan, what matters most is the result it gets for you, i.e. how effective the plan is in getting you what you want.
You would agree that there is no way you will know what works for your website SEO if you don’t constantly check and monitor it, as you will be left with no idea of how your website performs on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
To avoid this, you have to monitor your website performance on the SERP, which is where the term SEO Monitoring comes in. Let’s find out what it means and how important it is.
What Is SEO Monitoring?
SEO Monitoring is the process of constantly observing your website’s performance with Search Engines. This is a process that gives you full insight into which SEO plan is working and which is not.
With SEO Monitoring, you can get enough information on the issues affecting your website ranking for search queries, and you get to know what exactly needs to be done to fix it.
While performing SEO monitoring, there are various SEO metrics that you can monitor, and this can guide you in making the right decision. (I will be showing you all the SEO metrics you can monitor later in this article).
What Is Real-time SEO Monitoring?
Real-time SEO monitoring, as the name implies, is the process of observing the recent changes (real-time changes) in your website performance with Search Engines. This can only be done with the help of an SEO Monitoring tool, and I will be giving you 8 SEO monitoring tools you can use for this on your website.
The SEO monitoring tool observes your website daily and tracks all the SEO metrics available, and feeds you with the required information you need to fix any issue with your SEO health. Some of these tools also offer an Alerting Feature, which alerts you when there is a decline in your website’s SEO performance.
Why Should I care about Real-Time SEO Monitoring?
When monitoring the real-time performance of your website with Search Engines, there are many benefits attached to it. Because of this, it becomes essential to care about real-time SEO monitoring.
I will be discussing four reasons why Real-time SEO Monitoring is important, and I know after going through this, you will have a clear reason to care about SEO monitoring.
- Better SEO ranking.
- Competitive advantage in the SERP.
- To prevent search engine penalties.
- Get alert on needed improvements.
1. Better SEO Ranking:
The main reason you are reading this article now might be this; you want to better your SEO ranking and get to the top on the SERP for your target keywords.
This goal can be achieved when you monitor your website performance with both the search engines and your users and find out if there are any issues with its performance. If there is any, you can fix it, improving your SEO ranking. But the solution to the issue on your website will depend on the SEO metric affected.
For example, your page speed and bounce rate can affect SEO ranking, but when you set up your SEO Monitoring process and find out that your page speed is the major cause of your poor SEO ranking, what you need to do to fix it might be different from what you would have to do if it were your bounce rate.
Whichever performance metric you find to be affecting your SEO ranking, we have an article that explains how to fix various performance issues. Check it out.
2. Competitive Advantage In The SERP:
It is no longer news that you are not the only one with the goal to rank top for a particular keyword. Your competitors on the SERP also have the same goal and are doing all they can to get there.
If you are to work on random SEO plans and have no idea about what is working or not, then you will agree with me that your competitors doing it right will always outrank you on the SERP.
This is why you need to monitor your Search Engine Optimization processes and discover which works best for your business.
There are also SEO monitoring tools that you could use to analyze your competitor’s website ranking top and discover their SEO health, what keywords they are ranking for, how they structure their content and other SEO strategies they are using.
This will enable you to know what is working in your niche, set an SEO plan based on that, and improve on aspects they neglected in their search engine optimization process.
3. To Prevent Search Engine Penalties:
Every Search Engine has a set of rules they follow when ranking web pages on their SERP. These rules are often referred to as Ranking Factors, and Google alone has over 200 of these ranking factors, meaning 200 rules to follow. That sound like a lot.
These factors are also updated regularly, so you need to monitor your SEO in real-time to know when any significant ranking factors are not met, making your website perform poorly on the SERP.
There are also activities you need to avoid to prevent them from affecting your SEO rankings. Activities like using toxic links and publishing content that is not unique should be avoided; this is why you have to monitor your SEO to know when things are going wrong.
4. Get Alert On Needed Improvements:
When you set up an SEO monitoring tool for your website, one of the first things you get immediately is the current state of your website’s SEO health, and the tool then alerts you on the areas that need to be improved to get better E.A.T. from search engines.
E – Expertise.
A – Authoritativeness.
T – Trustworthiness.
After fixing the issue identified by your SEO monitoring tools, you should see an improvement in your website’s performance on the SERP. Still, you should know that SEO is a long-term strategy, and everything cannot change immediately. It could take weeks, months, and sometimes years before you see a significant boost in your organic traffic due to your SEO plan.
Also, your SEO monitoring tool constantly observes your website SEO. When performance declines, the tool will alert you via emails, SMS, Slack, or whichever medium you sign up for, depending on the company’s service.
By this, you get to be the first to know when there is an issue to fix, and you can fix them even before any Search Engine notices it and penalizes your site’s ranking. This keeps you updated on any changes on your website that are affecting your SEO.
At this point, it is clear that Real-time SEO monitoring is an essential process you need to include in your company’s business activities and with the help of the various SEO monitoring tools, this process is as easy as setting a tool of your choice to monitor your website and get alerts when then are issues that need to be fixed. But I am yet to tell you what expertly you are to monitor with an SEO monitoring tool.
What Should I Monitor?
What you can monitor depends on the SEO monitoring tool you are using to monitor your website’s SEO. Every tool monitors a website’s SEO with the help of SEO-related Metrics (SEO METRICS), and they use these metrics to rate your website’s SEO health.
But not all SEO metrics are present in every SEO monitoring tool. Each tool focuses on different aspects of your website and uses the SEO metric that monitors those aspects. But still, there are key SEO metrics that you need to monitor.
7 SEO Metrics You Should Monitor.
- Organic Traffic.
- Keyword Ranking.
- Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate:
- Indexed Pages:
- Core Web Vitals
- Domain Authority:
- Log Files.
Note: when it comes to SEO metrics, there are so many metrics that are SEO related, not just the seven listed above, but I decided to put together the major SEO metrics that really matter.
1. Organic Traffic:
One key metric you should monitor in your SEO monitoring process is your Organic traffic. These are traffic coming to your site from organic search on Search Engines.
Just checking out your website’s overall traffic is not enough as you could get this traffic from a wide range of sources like social media, email campaigns, paid ads and so on. But to analyze your website’s SEO health, you need to narrow down and check only your organic traffic. This metric gives you a view of how effective your SEO process is.
Your website score on this metric (organic traffic) will depend on other SEO metrics (like Keyword Rankings and so on), so monitoring this metric can give you an idea of your website scores for other metrics.
For example, when you discover that a particle page is getting a huge amount of organic traffic, then that tells you that the page has been crawled and indexed by a Search Engine, and it is ranking on the first page of the SERP for a keyword with a good search volume.
The SEO metrics are quite related; once your website has a bad score on any of them, it could potentially affect the overall SEO of your website.
2. Keyword Ranking:
This is a metric that shows you the keywords you are targeting with your web pages and your webpage position on the Search Engine Result Page (i.e. your ranking position) for those keywords.
Keyword ranking is a metric that gives you a direct view of how authoritative and trustworthy Search Engines see your website as. This is the main thing they use in ranking web pages on their SERP.
One SEO metric that directly impacts your Keyword ranking is your Domain Authority. Your ability to rank for a very competitive keyword depends on your Domain Authority and other factors like content quality and search intent.
It is very important to monitor this metric and get an alert from your SEO monitoring tool when your keyword ranking position is dropping in the SERP. And when this happens, you can then check your website and find out what the cause is. Sometimes all you have to do is update the content on the page; sometimes, you might have to fix other things.
3. Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate:
Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of page visitors that exit your web pages without interacting with the page.
Conversion Rate is a metric that measures the percentage of page visitors that interact with the webpage and click on links to other pages on the website or take a desired action on the webpage, like filling a form buying your product or service and so on.
Bounce Rate is the opposite of Conversion Rate; anything done to reduce a website’s Bounce Rate will increase its Conversion Rate. This relationship between these two metrics is the reason why I decided to put them together on this list.
It is important to monitor these SEO metrics as it lets you know how your website performs with your users. When your conversion rate is high, your users are having a good experience with your website, but when the bounce rate is high, you should know that your users are not getting the experience they are looking for.
The causes of a high bounce rate range from the website speed to the content quality and many more. But you need to know there isn’t a way to bring your bounce rate down to zero per cent. But when it is too high, you have to reduce it.
A blog should have a bounce rate of about 70% on average, a homepage about 40% on average and a service page about 30% on average. You can use this as a guide when monitoring your website’s bounce rate.
And like I said, your conversion rate increases if your bounce rate is reduced.
4. Indexed Pages:
For your web pages to be in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the Search Engine first has to Crawl the pages, then index them, and after that, it ranks the pages placing them in the perfect position on its SERP.
The Indexed Pages metric lets you know if your webpages have been crawled and indexed, and if your webpages aren’t getting crawled, then your SEO process will be fruitless because Search Engines will only display to their users the pages they have in their index.
So to get any result from SEO, you have to ensure that your pages are in the Search Engines index; hence you have to monitor these metrics to identify when some of your webpages have not been indexed. If this happens, most times, you have to submit your sitemap to the Search Engine, and your website will be crawled and indexed.
You also have to reduce your crawl depth to increase the number of pages that will be crawled and indexed because Search Engine bots do not have time to find your pages if the depth is more than five levels, but this might depend on the size of your website, its crawl budget and limit.
!function(e,i,n,s){var t=”InfogramEmbeds”,d=e.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement(“script”);o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src=”https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js”,d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,”infogram-async”);5. Core Web Vitals:
The Core Web Vitals are three metrics web vital metrics that Google included in its ranking factors in 2021, which make them part of the SEO metrics.
I know you would expect Page Speed to be in this list of SEO metrics because you and I know it is a key ranking factor in Search Engines. But I decided to leave that out because the Core Web Vital includes a metric that focuses on your page load time using the largest element.
In addition, Core Web Vital goes beyond just the speed of your website. It also measures the stability and interactivity of your website. All of these have an impact on your page experience.
Monitoring your website Core Web Vitals lets you know when your score on any of the metrics drops so you can improve them as soon as possible.
6. Domain Authority:
Domain Authority is an SEO metric developed by MOZ, which predicts how likely a website’s page will rank for a search query on a Search Engine. This metric is also called Domain Rating in some tools.
Your website domain authority score depends on the wealth of backlinks and referring domains you have. The more do-follow backlinks you have, the higher your Domain Authority.
There are tools that you can use to analyze your website backlinks and that of your competitor. You can use that of your competitors to know the number of backlinks you need and where to get them.
7. Log Files:
Log files are files in which a server writes every single request for resources on your website. These requests could be from Search Engine bots (when crawling) or your users.
This is an important metric to monitor as you can use the file to identify how frequent Search Engines crawls your website and how your server responds to these crawls.
With a log file, you can also identify what errors were met when a Search Engine bot crawled your website; from that, you know what to do to improve your Indexed Pages metric.
Now you know what metrics should be monitored when performing SEO Monitor for your business, I believe the next thing you want to know now is which tools to use to monitor these SEO metrics.
8 SEO Monitoring Tools And What They Monitor.
You can’t possibly be the one to monitor all SEO metrics frequently; that will be stressful. So you need a tool that you can use to monitor these metrics in real-time and alert you if there is an issue that needs to be fixed.
Like I said earlier, different tools can monitor different metrics, so I will give you a list of 8 SEO monitor tools and what they monitor.
| No. | SEO Monitoring tool | What it monitors |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Content King | Bounce Rate. Indexed pages. Log files. Core Web Vitals. Website Changes. Broken links… |
| 2. | Seomator | Page Speed. Broken links. HTML tags. Internal and External links. URL health… |
| 3. | Oncrawl | Log files Page Speed. Organic Traffic. Backlinks. Indexed pages. HTML quality… |
| 4. | Seobilty | Keyword ranking. Backlinks. Broken pages. HTML status. Internal and external links… |
| 5. | Aherfs | Keyword ranking. Domain Authority. Organic traffic. Indexability. Crawl log. Backlinks analytics… |
| 6. | SEMrush | Keyword ranking. Backlinks analytics. Organic traffic. Page speed. JS and CSS errors. Crawlability… |
| 7. | VitalFrog | Core Web Vitals. Page Speed. |
| 8. | Seolyzer | Log files. Indexed pages. 400 and 500 errors. Page speed… |
Conclusion.
Real-time SEO monitoring is an important process that every business needs to perform to get the best result from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process.
Monitoring your SEO metrics lets you know what is working and what needs improvement. Some SEO monitoring tools give suggestions on how to improve your SEO health.
A Real-time SEO monitoring process can get you ahead of your competitor on the SERP and increase your chance of ranking top for your target keywords.
I was able to put together eight different SEO monitoring tools that you can use to perform SEO monitoring for your business, and whichever tool you choose to use, note that they can only help you monitor your website and identify the issues with it.
You are the one to fix any issue with your website, not the tool. You could hire someone to assist you with this.
Monitor your SEO today.