Tracking Week: Tracking Your SEO Efforts
It’s my last post for tracking week (whew), I want to talk about what can be one of the trickier things to track, your SEO results. While I think there are a number of tracking software programs out there, there are ways of tracking SEO without using any expensive software.
The first thing you need to track your SEO results is some SEO traffic. Since I am limited on space and time here, I’ll assume you have that part down already. :)
Next, I would look at how you have set up the tracking on your site. If at all possible, you are going to want to split out your PPC traffic from your SEO traffic. One way to do this would be to set up different webpages for your SEO and PPC efforts. If you want to use the same content for your SEO and PPC pages, I would suggest leaving the original page up as an SEO page and then make a clone of that page under a different URL for your PPC traffic. (To avoid any duplicate content issues, make sure you use the “noindex,nofollow” meta tag on your PPC pages.)
Now that you have two pages, make sure you use different links on both of the pages so you can see which traffic came from which link.
Once you have done that, you can see which conversions are coming in through your SEO efforts. But knowing what pages are converting is only half the battle. Now you should figure out what keywords you are ranking for so you can track search engine rankings.
Now, once again, I know there are programs out there that go out and check your rankings…and I am sure there are some that work. I used to use WebPostion Gold, but got guilty/paranoid about hitting Google and Yahoo with automated programs…which is a no-no in the Webmaster guidelines. So by swearing off automated programs I have started to use some manual processes and analytics programs to track SEO performance.
If you are not already using Google Analytics, I would suggest you open an account. Google Analytics provides you a report called your “Overall Keyword Conversion” that shows you the different keywords that are driving traffic to your site. By sifting through this report, you will be able to identify what keywords are sending natural traffic to your site. It is also helpful to find new keywords that you might have started ranking well for recently.
After scanning Google Analytics, I like to pick my top 20 or 30 most important keywords and build a list of keywords to watch. You can use Excel, or make a list in a notebook, or whatever you want to do, so long as you are tracking regularly. I check my rankings for the various terms by simply conducting searches on the search engines I follow (Google and Yahoo – MSN is too spastic for me to really follow). I like to track my rankings about once a week, and I do it on a Monday (I always seem to notice ranking changes happen on the weekend – so Monday seems to be a good day for looking). By jotting down your rankings on a weekly basis you should be able to get a decent feel for how things are going in your SEO efforts.
Once note of caution though – if you are ranked on the third page or higher, don’t be too alarmed if your pages fluctuate three of four positions every time you check. The further you get from the first page, the higher your chances of seeing the subtle (and not so subtle) difference between the data centers.
Well, I hope that helped at least some of you. If you are anything like me you are probably a little trackinged out – so next week I promise not to talk about tracking at all! Hooray!
But before we bury the tracking topic altogether, help me out by sharing how you track your SEO performance. Also, if you have a rank tracking software program you want to recommend, please leave a comment with the program’s name.
Welp, happy weekend!
[Note: One last thing on tracking…I’m not sure if this happened to any of our affiliates, but today we got an email from Yahoo saying that they had shut off our Yahoo Conversion Counter. After a frantic call to Yahoo, it turns out the email was sent on accident and everyone’s Conversion Counters are working just fine. I wonder if anyone is getting unemployed for that mistake?]
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Comments
Great post, maybe I am just overly paranoid of "Big Brother" Google but as a multiple site owner that takes advantage of 3 way linking when possible I certainly hesitate to track more than one site with any of Google's webmaster tools (and thus admit that I am the webmaster for multiple sites that use each other for 3 way linking - although none are interlinked together of course). I am curious to see what you think of this train of thought or if maybe you see it as even a non-issue.
Posted by: Joel | December 1, 2006 07:06 PM
Hey Joel – great question. I know you are not the only one worrying about “Big Brother” Google using your own data against you. I have heard similar worries from affiliates who don’t want to use the Google conversion tracking tool for their PPC accounts.
I can’t really tell you if they would actually do this, because I am really not sure. At times, I thing Google gets a bad wrap just because they are the biggest search engine out there and they have a lot power. On the other hand, we have all felt the wrath of Google at one time or another, and it’s times like those that make us think Google is capable of just about anything.
It is plausible that Google would (or does) use data from Analytics, conversion tracking, and other products they offer for free to improve relevancy of their search results…and they have every right to do so.
In your particular case I would think that, with or without Google Analytics installed, Google could figure out your three-way linking scheme if they wanted to.
In the end, I guess I would be cautious about using certain helpful tools that Google puts out there, but I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about what is sitting on the grassy knoll.
Posted by: James Omdahl | December 4, 2006 08:35 AM