SEO or Search Engine Optimization requires a lot of analytical micromanagement.
This is in part due to the size of Google’s coverage. Google remains as the most used search engine in the world. In the United States, its market share is at 63.4% with 246 million unique visitors a day.
It’s not easy to reach Google’s first page, depending on how many competitors you have in your area. Once you do, you need to conduct SEO monitoring to stay at the top.
The most important part of maintaining your position is to track your keyword rank, which helps increase your website’s organic ranking in search engines.
There are a lot of things to track and it gets a little muddled sometimes. To keep you on your feet, here are 5 SEO monitoring aspects to keep watch of.
Update Your Site Regularly
You might think that it’s a common thing to do, but it’s a common mistake in SEO monitoring. Google doesn’t measure your website’s using quality alone–it measures the content freshness too. The best way to stay at the top is to keep your website’s content up-to-date and current.
“Text only” articles can lower your ranking in the search engine results page. It’s an old, outdated strategy that does more harm than good. If you need keyword maintenance, add videos and images to the content you make.
Adding visual content to your articles enhances the readers’ experience. It attracts people to link to your site and make your brand more appealing. Having an optimized website layout decreases bounce rates while increasing customer engagement.
Monitor How Fast Your Site Loads
Google places a lot of value to your website’s speed, yet a lot of sites don’t load fast. Don’t make the same mistake that other websites do, especially on mobile devices. Majority of searches happen in mobile, so if your website isn’t optimized to load fast, your visitors will look for faster ones to get what they want.
There are a lot of means for you to make your website load faster. Here are some of them:
- Get a more reliable web host
- Compress on all website images
- Use a content delivery network for downloads
If you don’t know why your load speed is slow, use Google PageSpeed Insights. It helps you find the issues that contribute to your website’s slow speed. It gives you suggestions on how to fix them too.
Check Your Link Building Efforts
SEO monitoring includes checking your backlinks. The most common mistake you can make is to focus on the quantity, rather than the quality, of your backlinks. You don’t need to build an extreme number of backlinks to that page once you ranked for a specific keyword.
Google will know if your website’s link-gaining pace is unreasonable. If you build your links too quickly, the search engine can get you banned.
If you use too many links that point to the same article, your website rankings can drop. Google places a lot of weight on relevant, useful content for their users.
Expand your inbound links to all the pages on your website if you want to maintain your keyword rank. The benefit of this strategy is a more diverse backlink profile. It makes your website more authoritative in Google’s point of view.
Boost Your Outbound and Internal Links
Links on your website are as important as backlinks. Google determines your site’s relevance through the outbound links you have for authoritative brands. Make sure that the external pages you link give relevant content to your visitors.
Internal linking is a useful strategy that helps you maintain your keyword rankings. It helps search engines to understand the importance of each page when done right. It makes your audience stay longer on your website since they click on more content.
As always, don’t go overboard with the links. Find an optimal number and keep doing SEO monitoring to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Failing to do so could hurt your search engine rankings.
Monitor Social Media Presence
Social media engagement plays a factor when it comes to ranking in search engines. They view the major social media platforms as authoritative brands. These websites include:
These pages have high page ranks in Google. Get links from these networks to increase your website’s relevance. When people like and share your posts, you gain more visibility to other people in the same social media channel.
A quick way to increase your website’s social media visibility is to add social media buttons at the bottom of your website. It helps people reach you easier in your social media channels, increasing your customer engagement rates.
Bonus: Monitor Your Competitors’ SEO Activities
Another good addition to your SEO monitoring activities is to look into the optimization efforts of your competitors. When they make significant changes to their SEO activities, it can mean that they discovered new ways of optimizing their web pages in the search results.
Another scenario might be that they received penalties from search engines, prompting them to change their bad practices.
Knowing your competitor’s optimization efforts lets you gain insight on how to make your SEO monitoring better. It helps you learn from both their strengths and weaknesses and formulate your own strategies that surpass theirs.
Get SEO Monitoring Services Today!
There are a lot of things you need to do to ensure that your website stays on top of the search engine results. Using these tips can help you maintain your rank and get more visitors. It gives you the opportunity to make your website authoritative and convert visitors into loyal customers.
You’ll miss this opportunity if your website goes down a lot, however. Even an hour of downtime can cripple your business in many ways.
If you want to get notified when your site goes down, we can help. We can check your website and alert you using SMS, calls, and emails if it goes down.
Do you have any questions? Do you need help monitoring your website? Contact us today and we’ll help you get started.
