If you are opting SEO services from agencies its very crucial to have your own way of tracking the SEO performance, as most of the times their tools would mislead you and would not convey anything except for some ununderstandable stuff.

Unfortunately, many SEO professionals don’t know how to track the SEO progress and they put you in trouble.

Take my words for granted, I have seen many SEO professionals who don’t know how to track the SEO progress.

If you want to gauge your SEO professional just ask them these questions and see what’s their response going to be,

Question from Business Owner-

I haven’t seen any traffic or its growth in the last three months from your SEO services or SEO implementation and hence I am not sure if we are progressing on this front?

Answer from a normal SEO professional-

SEO takes time and you may start seeing the results any time between 4-12 months.

As a business owner, you are just curious to know if your SEO team is heading in the right direction, but then the answer is, “to see results it takes 4-12 months of time!”

I say, that the SEO progress can be tracked right from the first week of the implementation.

Note: Traffic is the direct measure of SEO progress and it’s the not appropriate one always especially if your agency is billing you a bomb and you have got too many brand searches.

Google analytics and Google webmaster tools will have all the data that you need to take look at and that data helps you to understand the SEO performance of the website.

Here are some of the signs of understanding the SEO progress, just ask for it or keep a tab on those metrics,

1. Crawl stats of the website:

Unfortunately, this is not that simple to understand with the webmaster tools update since April 2019 (the new tool doesn’t have this feature anymore), however still there is a way to understand this with the help of your technical team. Or sometimes even without their help, you may be able to find it by yourself if your hosting provider has those features enabled for you.

Some of the hosting providers will have WP stats enabled on the server, which basically tracks all the bots visiting the websites, their frequency and more details around it and you may have to process to understand if your crawl frequency as improved or not.

In case if it’s not available you may have to ask your tech

With the old webmaster tools account, this is how the crawl frequency looks,

More the number of valid webpages it is crawling better it is.

There is a simple way too to figure out the crawl frequency improvement,

Impressions will spike up:

When your website crawl frequency increases your website impressions will spike up and this can be considered to be as the sign of SEO progress.

2. Keyword Coverage

If your website is heading to words SEO progress it will first show improvement with the keyword coverage, the count of keywords the website starts ranking will help one to understand the SEO progress. The keywords may not be in the first position, but then every now and then the website ranks for many new keywords along with the existing keywords.

This also covers too many long tail keywords as well.

3. Improvement in keyword average position

If you notice if your keywords are moving to the top positions it implies you are making a progress even when they are not on the first position, as this progress further would bring them on to the search engine first page.

In the below image you see an improvement in the SERP for one of the blogs, and observe how it has made changes in the traffic and impressions,

4. Index of valid web pages

If your website has few hundreds of valid webpages and if they all are getting indexed you can consider it be as SEO progress, as this is the first stage to make your website rank for several tens of keywords, but make sure indexing is happening only for valid pages and in case if this is happening for invalid pages your SEO is not in the right direction.

To check index status, you can refer to webmaster tools data or for the real-time track just do

site:yourdomain.com, and Google will display a list of all the webpages those have got indexed by them.

5. Improvement In CTR

This may or may not happen, which is purely based on the type of implementation, for example, if your website has scheme elements and implementing the rich snippets, let’s say product snippets would make your website appear appealing to users and the CTR would increases.

CTR increases with improvement in the average position of the keyword as well, hence make sure you are doing a relative study before you conclude the CTR impact on the search results.

A direct measure of SEO progress

Keywords Rank on The First Page:

This is the next stage or advanced stage where you would see all of your core keywords rank on the Google search results on the first page. This is the stage which is achieved on passing through all the stages mentioned above and you would SEe the core keywords getting consisting traffic only if your webpage is optimized properly for search engines by understanding the user expectations/behavior.

Free Traffic from Search engines:

If you are seeing lots of free traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing or any other search engine you can take it for granted, that your SEO progress is visible and it’s getting traffic to your website.

If you have access to analytics account for your website you can observe it on analytics.

Non-Brand Search Traffic:

The true sign of SEO progress is when your website ranks up for keywords that are related to your products or services and not the name of your company or brand.

E.g I consider it to be as SEO progress only when I rank for following terms on Google search results and not when I rank only for Kandra.pro or Kandra Digital, as those two are the terms which are the names of my business or website,

Here you can track the SEO progress of my website, in weeks of time from nowhere to the first page:

• Full stack digital marketing consultant- Ranks on the first position on Google
• App store optimization- Ranks on the first position of Google
• SEO quiz for beginners- Ranks on first fold first page
• Digital marketing monthly report – Ranks on the first position
• Digital marketing scams – Ranks on the first position of Google

And many more such keywords which were not there on Google first page and now they all and few tens of keywords rank on the first position and many more on the first page of Google.

Setting up the tracking,

Create and analytics and webmaster account for your website and you will have access to all of these metrics.

Summary:

By keeping a tab on all these metrics on a regular you just don’t understand SEO progress but you will be also able to devise new SEO strategies which take your organic growth to a different level and also you will understand search engines and their functionality deeper.

If you are looking for help in accessing the SEO performance you can seek my help and I would be more than happy as helping business owners and digital marketers make me feel great. 

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.