Performed according to best practices, SEO watch can become a real guarantee to ensure the success of search engine optimization. It allows for better rankings on search engines and attracting quality traffic. To turn this practice to one’s advantage, one must master the basics and implement effective monitoring strategies.
What does SEO watch really involve ?
SEO watch is a crucial element of search engine optimization strategy. It involves analyzing and tracking SEO performance through the use of monitoring tools. These tools automatically provide the necessary data to understand the health of a website, traffic evolution, and Google’s analytical robots’ behavior in relation to the implemented SEO strategies on the site.
In general, SEO watch is entrusted to an entity or an external provider not within the organizational structure of the company that owns the website. It requires an objective perspective to interpret the data generated by the tools in order to better adjust failing strategies. In this context, the SEO consultant then analyzes all elements related to the navigability, visibility, and availability of the site. Their expertise encompasses monitoring the site’s infrastructure as well as technical on-site and off-site SEO.
What elements of the site should be monitored ?
In web referencing, the structure of the site is of paramount importance as it ensures the performance of the applied SEO strategy. It also provides visitors with a better user experience. That’s why it’s advisable to regularly monitor all elements forming the site’s architecture. It’s essential to monitor their operation, availability, domain expiration, SSL certification, presence on blacklists, as well as robot blockers.
On a website, technical SEO failures are silent conversion killers. At the slightest issue, visitors promptly leave your web pages, making conversion impossible. It’s crucial to implement monitoring strategies to spot warning signs indicating a 404 status code, 5xx errors, a homepage in noindex, and orphan pages. You can also use monitoring tools to check page loading speed and organic traffic performance.
The online success of your website can also depend on actions external to your own efforts. Off-site monitoring remains the best way to stay updated and anticipate changes. Monitoring in this case focuses on position in the SERPs, crawl speed, technical errors, and the number of clicks. It’s also important to monitor other indicators such as Trust Flow (TF) or Citation Flow (CF) and backlinks.
Effective monitoring tools and strategies for online success
Until today, there are no tools that can handle multiple monitoring strategies and monitor various elements of a website. Few tools are capable of generating both SEO metric reports and technical error alerts simultaneously. To conduct a comprehensive SEO watch, it’s still necessary to combine several software programs.
To track the SEO performance of your site, Google provides two complementary free tools, namely Google Search Console and Google Analytics. The first software focuses its analyses on organic referencing, while the second monitors traffic and user behavior. These two tools thus provide comprehensive information detailing organic traffic and the performance of your site.
Majestic and Ahrefs are two reference tools when it comes to tracking backlinks. Both have their own indexing, which works somewhat like Google’s index. They can thus provide reliable data to analyze the quality and toxicity of links. You can use them to detect backlinks containing 404 errors or non-secure URLs.
Grammarly is a content checker tool, specifically for textual content on your site. It checks for grammar errors, typos, and plagiarism on your behalf. This makes it indispensable for ensuring the quality of your web content.
Google pays close attention to the accessibility and availability of your site, as these are important conditions for ensuring a better user experience. To analyze site speed, Pagespeed Insights can be the ideal tool. The data it generates allows you to determine the loading speed of your web pages.
Advantages of SEO watch
In a constantly evolving web landscape, SEO watch is a necessity to ensure online success. It’s just a matter of knowing how to combine the right tools and implement well-thought-out monitoring strategies. If these conditions are met, this SEO monitoring technique :
- improves your ranking on search engines : regular monitoring allows for adjustments to SEO strategies ;
- identifies strengths and weaknesses of your web pages : monitoring tools provide detailed reports on the health status of your website ;
- alerts you in real-time about improvements or regressions : With SEO watch, you will be quickly informed through technical error alert tools ;
- facilitates competitive monitoring : Some monitoring tools can monitor your competition on your behalf ;
- avoids search engine penalties : organic SEO is constantly evolving, SEO watch allows you to stay informed about every new rule on search engines.