SEO Watch List

People can often feel overwhelmed when conducting an SEO campaign. It feels like there’s a huge amount of information and data that you need to keep an eye on. This is true, however if you are limited on time there are a few things that you should make sure you check regularly, and if this is all you can do then you should still be able to get a good sense of what is going on. When keeping checks on SEO work, it is important that you think of the main points; how much traffic am I getting, and how many people are talking about the website. If you can answer these questions then you should be heading along the right lines.

Traffic
Keeping an eye of traffic is perhaps the single most important aspect. After all, if someone is paying you to carry out an SEO campaign, then they are effectively paying you to help increase their traffic. Logging into Google Analytics on a daily basis is well worth the effort, even if it’s just for a quick glance over the figures. I would also recommend that you set at least a little bit of time aside to look into traffic patterns. Try and monitor how long people are spending on your website, how high or low is your bounce rate and what your most popular pages are. If you can get a handle on these figures you will start to get a good idea of how your visitors see and use your website, and changes can be made when necessary....without having to rely on guess work.

Traffic Sources and Links
Undoubtedly, in some shape or form you will be trying to increase the number of links pointing to your website, and get more people talking about your business or online project. Checking the traffic sources will help identify which links are providing the most value and give you a good marker with which to measure your success. Checking the number of inbound links is also a good way of keeping tabs on your campaign. Services such as Yahoo’s site explorer will indentify any inbound links you have coming in. The numbers published are not 100% accurate and you will find they vary somewhat, however it’s still worth checking to see how well your content is spreading. Not everyone will let you know if your content or story has been published, so this is also a very good method of seeing who has published any content or news stories you may be distributing.

Ranks
The number one goal of any SEO campaign is to increase your ranks on the search engines. Results should be checked regularly and it’s recommended to use a spreadsheet with month by month results. You will find that some keywords jump around a little, this is perfectly normal and is nothing to be worried about. Google personalise search results which does make tracking your ranks harder, but if you take the long term approach and compare results over three month periods you will get a good idea of what’s going on. Just don’t fall into the trap of checking daily and getting worried when certain results slip or even disappear...it happens!