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Welcome to this video on SEO tracking tools. I am going to talk to you about 4 tools that
I love and use. One of them is free and one of them is not free and I am going to talk
to you about what each of them does and what you can accomplish as you are tracking the
success of your SEO strategy so the assumption here is that you have done some work. Maybe
you have targeted some keywords you have built your authority, you have looked at some technical
components of your SEO strategy and now you want to find out how all of that work is performing.
I typically use four tools that do a few unique things for me. The first one is Google Analytics
and this is just a typical analytics tool. It is going to tell you how many people came
to your site, how many of them were on mobile devices how many came from different countries.
It tells you a bunch of different information about the people that came to your site. It
is an absolutely free tool and it is pretty easy to embed into your site. You will definitely
want that right away after your launch. The second is Google Webmaster Tools and this
gives you a more in-depth look at some SEO metrics. So the SEO health of your site, how
many of your pages are indexed, or in Google’s library, what is your click through rate on
the Google search results page, what are your most commonly used keywords that actually
drive to your site, those types of things. The third tool is Open Site Explorer, you
can find that at opensiteexplorer.org. It has a free version and then you can actually
update to the pro version and basically what it allows you to do is type in your URL and
it will tell you how many inbound links you have, links that point to your site, how many
social shares you have and which sites are linking to you, which ones are your top pages.
It’s all about authority. It is all about measuring your site authority. The final thing,
the final tool that I use commonly is actually a fully paid tool, it is called raven tools
and it tracks your rankings for any number of keywords that you put in. It tracks a lot
of your health metrics overtime you can do keyword research right from the tool. You
can do competitive analysis. You can do some more advanced things within raven tools. So
when you are thinking about tracking you want to think about two different things, you want
to think about tracking what happens on the search page or on Google’s page and then
you want to think about tracking what is actually happening on your website. So one of the things
you will to look at when you are tracking on Googles page. The first thing is what keyword
did someone use to find your site. So you can find that through either Google analytics
or Google Webmaster Tools. They will both show the same data. Which keywords drove to
your site most commonly. The second piece of information you want to look at is what
your click through rate was. So if your ad or your listing came up on Google, your organic
listing came up on Google. How many, uh, what percentage of the time did people click on
yours as opposed to someone else’s. This is really good insight because you can tweak
your title or your meta description to become more appealing and kind of play around with
some things to try to build up that click through rate and have more people coming to
your site. The third thing you will want to look at within Google’s sphere is your rank
and that’s what I use raven tools for. There are other tools that measure your ranking
and of course you can just check that manually. So you will want to monitor your rank for
specific keywords you care about. Once you get to your site, once people get to your
site, you will want to track a few things, first of all conversion. If you have a point
of conversion on your site, maybe it is a sale or a lead form you will want to track
how many of those came from Google so then you can attribute properly back to the work
that you have been doing in SEO. Second, you want to look at your overall organic traffic.
Make sure you are separating this out from your overall traffic so that you are looking
just at the traffic that came in from search engines and not from paid but only from organic.
The third thing you want to look at is time on site. How engaged was the user? Did they
spend just a few seconds on the site or did they spend a lot of time on the site. This
can tell you whether or not the search term that people are using is actually pulling
up a page that feel relevant. The final thing you will want to look at is the actual path
on the site so Google analytics will give you the opportunity to look at the path that
a user takes through your site. Start at the home page then they go to the about page,
they see something interesting they go to a product page. That path is all trackable
through Google analytics. So those are some of the things that you will want to think
about as you are building your SEO reports and analyzing your data to improve over time.
Hopefully this has been helpful, gets you started and if you like the video feel free
to give me a thumbs up or check out some of my other videos on SEO fundamentals. Thanks
a lot!