Search engine optimization (SEO) monitoring gives you insights into your website's performance in search engines. In this guide, I'll go over some of the best tools and the metrics you should track.
What you will learn
- What SEO monitoring is and how it works
- Which tools you can use for comprehensive SEO monitoring
- Which SEO metrics you should monitor
What is SEO monitoring?
SEO monitoring is an ongoing practice of assessing a website's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). It offers useful data about the site's ranking and visibility and granular data about its organic search traffic.
This data is crucial for understanding how well your website performs in search engines and identifying areas for improvement.
At the most basic level, SEO monitoring involves tracking keyword rankings.
But while keyword rankings remain important, effective SEO monitoring goes beyond this basic metric to analyze traffic, technical performance, and website authority.
The goal is to see how your pages rank for target keywords so that you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
Still, those adjustments require many monitoring processes besides tracking keyword rankings, such as:
- Traffic data analysis—You should know where your traffic comes from, whether there's any seasonality (and why it happens), and which specific pages get the most and least organic traffic.
- Website performance evaluation—A website's performance heavily depends on various technical SEO aspects like indexability and page speed, which you should track to prevent or fix issues that can damage your rank
- Website authority—Google prioritizes credible, authoritative websites, so you should know whether your website is considered one and how to improve its authority in the eyes of users and search engines.
Why is monitoring SEO important?
SEO monitoring is important because it tells you how effective your SEO strategy is, helping you uncover new opportunities to rank your website well in search engine results. If you're already ranking high, it also helps you track new opportunities so you can take advantage of them quickly.
Besides, SEO monitoring isn't always internal—you can also perform competitor analysis to see how others in your niche are doing and adapt your strategies to gain a competitive edge.
Monitoring your SEO is critical because it directly impacts your website's ability to rank well and drive organic traffic.
Take the example of Regex SEO, an agency that launched a new homepage and observed an immediate decline in search rankings. Tracking their page's keyword density helped them recognize the issue in time, and revise their content.
After this adjustment, they saw an immediate and full recovery in rankings.
5 tools to monitor SEO results
SEO monitoring can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially if you're tracking multiple metrics across many pages and competitors. However, with the right tools, you can streamline the process and gain actionable insights without getting overwhelmed by data.
Here are 5 SEO monitoring tools that streamline the process.
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free, comprehensive SEO monitoring tool that offers real-time data on your site's SEO performance.
This data is available through different reports, such as:
- Performance report—Shows various search data and metrics like a page's SERP position, clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR).
- Pages report—This tells you which pages on your site are indexable by Google's search algorithm and whether there are any indexing issues.
- Core Web Vitals report—This helps you fix page-level technical issues to ensure a more pleasant loading experience.
The Performance report is the most popular because it provides granular search traffic data. You can see the most and least performing pages, queries people use to find your website, and keyword positions to tweak your SEO strategy.
Google Search Console also offers handy features like the URL inspection tool, which lets you see if a page can be indexed properly and what to do if this isn't the case.
The tool can offer particularly useful insights if you notice a sudden traffic drop, which might be caused by indexing issues.
Google will notify you via email to help you proactively address website issues that might impact your keyword rankings. You might also receive emails about significant performance milestones, like many clicks within a specific time frame.
In summary, Google Search Console is a comprehensive free tool that provides valuable insights into your website's SEO performance. With real-time data on search traffic, indexing, technical issues, and more, it's an essential tool for monitoring and optimizing your site.
2. Surfer Content Audit
While Google Search Console (GSC) has many uses, it lacks actionable insights for improving your SEO strategy. That's where Surfer's Content Audit comes into play.
When you connect your GSC account to Surfer, you'll be able to see your site's best-performing pages with key SEO metrics like:
- Keyword positions
- Traffic
- Historical changes in performance
- Content score
Surfer suggests pages with the highest ranking potential to help you get quick wins and rank your site without guesswork.
Content Audit also calculates each page's Content Score, which shows exactly how well-optimized the page is. You can use Surfer's Content Editor to boost your page's score.
Besides advising on the right word count, content structure, and keywords to include on the page, Content Editor lets you update existing pages in a single click with the Auto Optimize feature. You can also include links automatically to avoid manual internal linking.
3. Semrush’s Domain Overview
Domain Overview by Semrush offers comprehensive data about a website's paid and organic search traffic. When you enter a URL, you'll get a robust report with plenty of useful data, such as:
- Domain Authority Score
- Organic traffic
- Number of backlinks
- Top organic keywords
As you scroll through the report, you'll find useful charts outlining the site's growth data. You can choose the time frame for which you want to see the key metrics, which helps you understand your website's performance in specific periods.
Domain Overview is also a useful competitive analysis tool. It lets you directly compare up to five domains and see their main SEO data like organic traffic, backlinks, and paid traffic.
If you're unsure which competitors to include, the platform will highlight them and show you where your site stands compared to others that show up for your keywords.
Other useful insights you can get from Domain Overview include:
- Keywords by search intent
- Branded vs. non-branded keywords
- Detailed backlink data (top anchors, referring domains, etc.)
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics and Google Search Console go hand-in-hand.
While the latter focuses specifically on website performance, Google Analytics 4 offers comprehensive audience-centric metrics like:
- New users: The number of first-time website visitors
- Sessions: The number of unique browsing sessions within a specific time frame
- Average engagement time: The average time someone spends browsing your site
- Views per user: The number of pages a single user visits during a session
- Bounce rate: The number of users that left your website within 10 seconds without triggering any events (e.g. clicking on another page or filling out a form)
The platform also offers robust user acquisition and traffic acquisition reports, showing how users find your website and engage with different pages.
This data helps you understand your most effective traffic sources so that you can double down on what works.
Like GSC, Google Analytics is a free tool, and it's one of the first platforms you should sign up for when you start measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
It's useful for understanding who visits your site and which specific pages draw the most attention, which lets you see which tactics work the best and use them to rank other pages higher.
5. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you free, limited access to the provider's two solutions—Site Explorer and Site Audit. When you sign up, you can see all the major SEO metrics (search traffic, backlinks, etc.) alongside various useful data.
Specifically, the platform closely examines your website for over 140 common issues that might impact your SERP rankings, including:
- Indexability issues
- Broken links and pages
- Mobile optimization problems
- HTTPS issues
- Performance issues
Webmaster Tools also come with some proprietary metrics like traffic value.
Ahrefs estimates how much your organic traffic would be worth if it came from Google Ads, which can help you ballpark the cost of paid ads if you plan on running them.
You can use this to compare SEO vs paid ads ROI.
Finally, Webmaster Tools can be useful if you want to understand your website's backlink profile. You get domain- and page-level backlink data, such as:
- Referring domains
- Link type (sponsored, nofollow, etc.)
- Broken link data (for internal and external links)
Thanks to these features and user-friendly reporting, Webmaster Tools can be a solid option for beginners who don't require advanced SEO analytics.
5 SEO metrics to monitor
Not all SEO metrics are equally important—if you're only getting started, prioritize the following:
1. Organic clicks
Organic clicks represent the total number of clicks to your pages from organic search results in a given time frame. They reflect your site's organic traffic, and pretty much any SEO tool can be used to track them.
When monitoring your traffic, differentiate between total and unique clicks. The former includes repeat clicks from the same visitor, while the latter only counts new clicks from unique visitors.
Ideally, both metrics should show an ongoing positive trend. Organic clicks should grow naturally as you add new pages if you optimize them well.
Prioritizing keywords is a great strategy to boost your organic clicks.
Instead of trying to rank for highly competitive keywords from the get-go, prioritize long-tail keywords with lower competition to avoid your pages being buried under tons of well-established websites.
For example, instead of targeting a keyword like "wireless keyboards," opt for a long-tail variation like "bluetooth wireless keyboards for Mac." While such keywords have a lower search volume, they will let you cut through the competition and attract more clicks.
Other effective ways of boosting organic clicks include:
- Optimizing your page title and meta description—Include the primary keyword in metadata to ensure consistency and relevance. Keep the page title under 60 characters and meta descriptions between 140 and 160 (with spaces).
- Consolidate your content—Turn several content pieces targeting similar keywords into one long-form piece to consolidate its relevance and rank for multiple keywords.
- Aim for SERP features—Optimizing your content for the featured snippet and AI Overviews increases your chances of showing up in them for relevant searches, which can improve your website's visibility and clicks.
2. Keyword rankings
Keyword rankings show the position of your website or specific pages in search results for the given keyword. They directly showcase your site's visibility in organic search, so you should monitor the rankings of all pages targeting your main search terms.
Keyword rankings shift with time, so you should closely monitor your SERP positions.
Using a rank-tracking tool like Surfer's can show you how search results change over time and what you can do to achieve or maintain a high rank.
Ensure your content follows Google's helpful content guidelines, most notably:
- Provide tangible value to the reader
- Include unique insights or perspectives
- Ensure accuracy and fact-checking
- Demonstrate expertise and experience behind the content
You can use internal linking strategies like content clusters or content silos to pass link juice to your key pages and help them rank high.
Besides content, you need to optimize the technical aspects of your website, such as:
- Page speed—Use lightweight formats like WebP for visuals, minify coding, and reduce redirects to maximize your site's load speed.
- Ensure mobile-friendliness—Pay attention to your site's structure and layout to provide a pleasant mobile browsing experience.
- Remove duplicate content—Pages with similar or the same content might not rank high, so either remove duplicates or use canonical tags to define the main version you want to rank
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your site and act as votes of confidence in your website's authority—as long as they come from reputable sources.
Google associates your website with those linking to it, so backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites can cause the search algorithm to believe your site isn't reputable.
Dont only count the number of backlinks but also look at the quality of linking domains.
Several tools we've discussed here, such as Google Search Console, Domain Overview, and Webmaster Tools, can provide this data.
You should also ensure backlinks are "dofollow," which means Google's crawlers can follow them from the referring page to yours.
You can acquire backlinks naturally by creating high-quality content worth referring to. Still, doing so can take a while, so you should also take a more active approach.
Some of the most popular link-building strategies include:
- Guest posting—Publishing content on another reputable website in your industry is a simple and effective way to get backlinks. Find websites accepting guest posts, and make sure they're credible and authoritative.
- Reporter relationships—Qwoted is a well-known initiative where reporters submit requests for expert insights on a specific topic. You can be cited as a source and get a backlink by providing them.
- Broken link building—Look for broken links on other websites related to your business and suggest replacing the link with the one to your page or a resource that fits the context.
To monitor the impact of backlinks on site performance, conduct backlink audits and pay special attention to link reports. Pages with the most high-quality backlinks will stand the highest chance of ranking well.
4. Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of sessions/visits that resulted in an action indicating conversions, such as:
- Making a purchase
- Signing up for a specific service
- Signing up for a newsletter
You can track conversion rates in Google Analytics or other tracking software.
Google Analytics lets you monitor conversions or set up specific events you want to focus on (e.g., generating a lead).
By tracking conversion rates, you can make more confident business decisions.
You'll know which of your pages draw in conversions so that you can double down on them or optimize other pages accordingly. You can also see which offers or lead magnets work best, which can help you tweak your marketing strategy as needed.
The best way to increase conversion rates depends on your website type. If you're running an ecommerce website, you should:
- Create optimized product pages
- Demonstrate features, benefits and user reviews
- Create a frictionless purchase experience
Make sure your landing pages are straightforward and contain concise yet powerful copy. Don't hesitate to be more promotional, but don't go overboard to avoid sounding too salesy.
5. Click-through rate (CTR)
In the context of organic traffic, CTR is the percentage of impressions that results in a visit. In other words, it's the proportion of users who see you in search results and click on your page.
CTR says a lot about your pages' ability to draw in a user and ensure engagement.
A low CTR indicates that you're not doing a good job of getting a user interested enough to click on your page in the search results.
You must pay special attention to meta titles and descriptions to avoid this and boost your CTR.
Besides using keywords correctly and ensuring the right length, follow these tips:
- Use descriptive meta titles—Instead of dry headlines like "Pancake Recipe," go with something more descriptive like "Quick Homemade Pancake Recipe"
- Write conversion-focused meta descriptions—Use your meta descriptions to convey the page's value and directly invite the reader to visit it through clear CTAs
- Match search intent—Search intent can be informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Understand what the user is looking to achieve and match the title with their needs
- Use numbers—Numbered listicles reflect simplicity, which is highly appealing to users. For example, a title like "7 Surefire Ways To Improve Your Attention Span" is much more compelling than "A Guide to Improving Your Attention Span"
- Use power words—Power words ("best," "effective," "skyrocket," etc.) can make your titles appealing and increase CTR, but don't use them too heavily to avoid clickbait
Key takeaways
- SEO monitoring is a continuous process of monitoring your website's visibility and performance in search engine rankings. It measures the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts and can provide insights on future tactics and strategy tweaks.
- Besides helping you execute an effective SEO strategy, SEO monitoring lets you perform competitor research to understand the search landscape and see what it takes to secure the top spots in SERPs.
- If you're new to SEO monitoring, you can start with staple tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You can choose third-party options like Webmaster Tools and Surfer for in-depth insights.
- Organic clicks and keyword rankings are among the key metrics to track because they directly reflect the effectiveness of your SEO tactics. Most tools let you monitor these metrics, and you should do it continuously to identify any notable trends and patterns.
- Backlinks impact your site's authority, so you should monitor them closely and do your best to acquire links from reputable websites. You can do this by creating shareable content, writing guest posts, and providing value to other websites in your niche.
- Showing up in search isn't enough—you must also get users to click on your pages. Monitor your CTR and improve it by optimizing your meta titles and descriptions.
- SEO tracking goes beyond search-related metrics. You should also understand your pages' ability to generate conversions, so keep a close eye on conversion rates to see how you can optimize your pages to get the most out of each visit.
