How to prepare your website monitoring for SEO

Whether you intend to work on your SEO now or later, you need to plan for it when putting your website together. The first critical step is to set-up your website monitoring tools for SEO. This will allow you to have a clear starting point when setting out to begin your SEO efforts

This applies even if you don’t intend to start working on your SEO right now.
The data collected will be very useful once you decide to do so.

Step 1: Install Google Analytics to monitor your website

Google Analytics works in the background collecting information for you. It’s easy to install (just add the code to your site) just send the code to your webmaster or install a plugin or code through your CMS. No matter what web platform you use, it is reasonably easy to do. Once the Google Analytics code is working, it enables you to see historical data with patterns of seasonal behavior. You’ll also be able to see where visitors enter your site and exit it, with the basic one-step installation.

Step 2: Monitor your website conversions

Monitoring conversions is very important. Make sure that you create some goals for your website, For example: a conversion goal you want to monitor might be the amount of times your enquiry form was filled in, or the number of times a whitepaper was downloaded from your website.

If you’re running pay-per-click ads you can measure your conversions very easily by adding their conversion code on the “thank you page” (the landing page people arrive after having contacted you successfully or bought something from you shop, downloaded your free pdf etc to monitor this.

Step 3: Monitor your search engine ranking

It’s an obvious one, but in order to have data you can use for your search engine optimisation later, you need to monitor your search ranking. You need to record the position you have now, in order to monitor and finetune your work depending on your progress.

Let’s say one day you have a strong reduction in the number new leads or sales coming from your website. Rank monitoring will give you in a few seconds the answer is it because you lost your position in search engines.

You will immediately understand which keyword was responsible and fix the situation. If the problem didn’t come from a keyword drop , then you will immediately put the energy in the right direction to solve the problem fast.

Knowing your search engine position has an impact of more than 80% on our business, it is vital for a company to know their ranking. Without this, in a scenario like that, you would be facing a big problem.

Step 4: Monitor your competition

It’s important to monitor your competitor’s assets, ranking, activities and understand which ones are gaining advantage at your expense. Find out which of your competitors are active online, who you’re competing with for the major keywords in your industry (often it’s not who you think). Nowadays, the ones that are actively using SEO and online marketing are the ones that are the most dangerous to your business.

Monitor their activities and make sure you outperform what they do. Adjust your SEO output based on how aggressive your competition is. Some great tools to effectively monitor your competition without any manual work are SEMrush and Ahrefs.

Following these steps will set you up with great monitoring. You will gain deep insight into your performance and that of your competitors in a matter of a few months. This will help you understand to what extent you need to invest in SEO and other marketing activities to reach your business goals.
Read more about FairTech’s SEO audit services