the art of seo(chapter eleven)

Tracking Results and Measuring Success

goal -> driver

***Why Measuring Success Is Essential to the SEO Process***
1.The Tracking Cycle: Produce, Launch, Measure, Refine

*Define an SEO strategy, determine an implementation schedule, and establish a clear understanding of goals. What are you going to accomplish,and what is the strategy for accomplishing it? How will you measure progress?

*Establish a baseline.

*Proceed with your project. Implement the SEO strategy—new URLs, technical site changes, new content development, and so on.

*Collect data

*Compare the baseline data to the new data.

*Refine your campaign.

2.Establishing a Proper Baseline
tool-AuthorityLabs

***Measuring Search Traffic***
1.Basic Overview:
Google Analytics

2.Selecting the Right Analytics Package:

3.Extracting Valuable SEO Data in Web Analytics
*Traffic by search engine
*Traffic by keyword

4.Number of pages getting search traffic
An indirect way of measuring effective indexation is to keep an eye on how many pages are getting search traffic.

For some examples of these solutions, see Dan Parker’s “How to steal some ‘not provided’ data back from Google” or Moz’s “Easing the Pain of Keyword Not Provided: 5 Tactics for Reclaiming Your Data”.

5.Segmenting Search Traffic

6.Referring Sites

***Competitive and Diagnostic Search Metrics***
1.Search Engine and Competitive Metrics

2.Site Indexing Data
You can improve this data by performing your site query, switching to 100 results per page, and going to the last page of the Google results to see if the number of results has changed. This will give you more accurate totals for the number of pages indexed.

3.Link-Based Tracking of Content Marketing

4.Ranking
*you can get the data directly from Google Search Console
*AuthorityLabs

5.Shelf space
You can also compute your average shelf space across 1,000 keywords. If it’s 10%, you know that you control 10% of those SERPs.
• If you care about more than a few keywords, or if you want to get a lot of longtail traffic to your site, categorize your keywords and queries. Typical categories include branded versus nonbranded, product, subject or topic, and the geographical location mentioned in the query.

6.SEO Platforms
*Conductor Searchlight
*Rio offers SEO Search Analytics

7.Crawl Errors

8.Search Engine Robot Traffic Analysis
Understanding how robots are spidering their sites is another thing that expert SEO practitioners should know how to do.
Other logfile analysis programs include:
• AWStats
• Sawmill
• Webalizer
• W3Perl
• Piwik

***Key Performance Indicators for Long-Tail SEO***
*Unique crawled URLs
*Search visitors per contributing page.
*Keywords per page
*Search visitors per keyword
*Index-to-crawl ratio
*Search visitors per crawled page

***Duplicate Content***
tool-SEObook.com’s Duplicate Content Checker

***Other Third-Party Tools***
MozBar
SEO Quake
SEO for Firefox
SpyFu
SEMrush
Rio SEO Search Analytics
Rio SEO Website Optimizer
Searchmetrics Essentials