Here's how you can monitor your site's SEO performance

SEO is in a weird place right now. About one in five LinkedIn posts in my feed currently claims that SEO is dead, or has been assimilated by LLMs. Do not be remiss, dearest reader, because even an LLM still uses search engines like Google and Bing for web crawling.

In other words, SEO still matters, a lot. Additionally, it's never a bad idea to keep tabs your website's SEO performance. SEO monitoring helps you identify exactly what needs improvement so that your website can get the attention it deserves, without directly emptying your pockets and bidding your life's savings on a couple of keywords.

What is SEO monitoring?

SEO monitoring refers to the continuous process of tracking website performance metrics that impact your SEO rankings, simple. It shows you the aspects of your website that could use improvement and what aspects are currently working well. You can gain further insights by comparing your metrics to competitor sites that are currently ranking for keywords you target.

Typically, SEO monitoring involves:

• Tracking keyword rankings
• Analyzing organic traffic patterns
• Evaluating technical SEO elements
• Monitoring backlink profiles
• Assessing page performance metrics
• Checking for crawlability and indexation issues

Why does SEO monitoring matter?

Using SEO monitoring allows you to assign metrics to changes in your website’s rankings. That way, you can make continuous improvements backed by data as opposed to hoping something sticks. Identifying the most impactful improvements you can make allows you to zero in on what matters most. What gets measured, gets managed—you know what it is.

You can also use SEO monitoring to catch technical issues before they impact your rankings. Whether it’s an update to Google’s algorithm or a change in your CMS, monitoring SEO metrics allows you to make pre-emptive changes to keep your numbers up.

What are some key SEO metrics to keep an eye on?

As with most things in marketing, there’s no shortage of metrics you can monitor. However, there are a few crucial metrics that you need to monitor. We’re going to group the most important metrics into categories so that you can more easily put your metrics to use based on the results you’re looking for.

Traffic Metrics

One of the main reasons to invest in SEO is to drive more traffic to your site. These are the three main metrics you should monitor when trying to increase your traffic:

• Organic Sessions: These are the number of people who visit your site through results on search engines.
• New versus Returning Visitors: Higher levels of return visitors signal to search engines that your site consistently provides visitors with value.
• Bounce Rate: This refers to how many people leave shortly after being directed to your site and signals to search engines that your site is not delivering the content users seek.

Engagement Metrics

You also want users to engage with your site, not just visit it. Here are likely the most important engagement metrics for SEO monitoring:

• Pages Per Session: You want users that find your site through organic searches to explore your other pages. The number of pages per session tells you how many they visit on average.
• Scroll Depth: Users who read an entire page provide you with more value making it an important engagement metric.
• Click-through Rate: Every page comes with an intention for an action from the user. The click-through rate tells you the percentage of people who take that action.

Technical SEO Metrics

For some sites, certain technical aspects can hold back your performance and therefore ranking, including:

• Page Load Speed: If your site suffers from performance issues and takes too long to load, users bounce from your site before they see your content.
• Mobile-friendliness: Nowadays, most people browse the internet on their phone or tablet, so your site needs to work just as well for them as desktop users. Crazy how we still need to talk about this.
• Crawl Errors: Google can’t rank your site if its bots can’t crawl through it. Look out for crawl errors, such as broken links, and fix them immediately. Getting on top of issues like these as quickly as possible is the name of the game here.

Content Performance Metrics

The most in-your-face SEO metrics are your content performance metrics, such as:

• Keyword rankings: Most people investing in SEO aim to improve their keyword ranking, but that comes from improving other SEO metrics.
• Featured snippets: Oftentimes overlooked, featured snippets can drive more traffic than a high-ranking page.
• Backlink quality and quantity: The number and quality of sites linking to your website help search engine’s assess the trustworthiness and authority of your site.

Can't have an article without a top 5 of something!

We've talked at length about metrics, let's dive into some practicalities next. Martech vendors are kind of like a plague these days, so there's obviously no shortage of SEO tools around. These are the five most popular ones:

1. Google Search Console: Showing which queries bring users to your site, identifying indexing issues, and highlighting mobile usability problems makes Google Search Console the core of most monitoring strategies.
2. Google Analytics: It’s not specific for SEO, but Google Analytics provides tons of data that can help you monitor SEO metrics such as which channels drive traffic and the behavior flow of users.
3. Ahrefs: As one of the most expensive SEO monitoring tools, Ahrefs provides a premium monitoring service for just about any metric you could want.
4. SEMRush: For a budget-friendly alternative to Ahrefs, consider SEMRush. It’s another all-in-one tool, but it primarily focuses on content.
5. Screaming Frog: To identify technical SEO errors, use Screaming Frog. It crawls your site the same way Google does to find issues.

Don't forget about Google Lighthouse

Now, one can’t discuss SEO monitoring without mentioning Google Lighthouse. They provide a pretty complete overview of your site’s performance and then assign it a grade for different categories. It covers everything from mobile-friendliness and content quality to performance and crawlability.

After completing the test, Google Lighthouse gives you actionable tips on how to improve your site. However, their recommendations are fairly technical, so you'll need at least a modicum of SEO expertise to implement their suggestions. It’s a free tool, though, which makes it accessible to anyone and is an overall pretty valuable asset to have.

SEO monitoring made even simpler with Oh Dear

Running SEO tests across your site and recording your metrics takes a lot of time. Oh Dear simplifies the entire process by integrating Google Lighthouse into our full-fledged website monitoring suite. It automatically tracks key SEO metrics so you can monitor the impact of your SEO efforts as you build or expand your site.

Automatically running daily Google Lighthouse scans also notifies you of issues before they impact your rankings. Whether you accidentally loaded a full-scale image instead of a compressed one or a plugin you used suddenly updated, causing a hit to your site’s performance, you’ll be notified immediately thanks to Oh Dear’s daily scans. Neat!

Lighthouse monitoring is natively integrated with Oh Dear’s broader website monitoring suite so you can truly keep track of every little aspect of your website’s health and performance. Try Oh Dear today for free for 30 days with no strings attached—see how you like it!