What Is SEO Monitoring?

SEO monitoring involves tracking the visibility and ranking of your website. Then using those insights to optimize your SEO campaigns. 

For example, here’s what monitoring your website’s SEO health using the Semrush Site Audit tool looks like:

But that’s not all. The SEO monitoring process includes:

• Tracking your keyword rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) over time
• Analyzing the profiles of backlinks pointing to your site
• Monitoring engagement metrics like page views, bounce rate, and click-through rate (CTR)
• Checking for broken links to avoid penalties from search engines
• Monitoring technical aspects like page speed
• Identifying problem areas like crawling issues and low page speed

Regular checkups keep you informed on how your website is doing. So you know what changes to make. 

Further reading: SEO Basics: The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Beginners

Later, we dive into the details of how to perform SEO monitoring tasks using the right tools and tracking the right metrics. But first, let’s look at why monitoring SEO is a critical activity.

Why Is Monitoring SEO Important?

SEO monitoring alerts you to things you could be doing better. So your site and content rank higher in the SERPs.

Here’s a success story.

SEO monitoring was a game-changer for artisan bakery Edelweiss Bakery. While popular with locals, the company wasn’t getting the digital traffic it had hoped for. 

Monitoring SEO showed it needed a whole new plan to boost online brand visibility and increase online and offline orders. 

It switched gears to a three-stage strategy that targeted its site, blog, and ecommerce platform.

The result? 

A 460% increase in monthly mobile organic traffic—from 171 to 785.

Tracking what’s working and what isn’t on your website can achieve a number of things. 

Increase Visibility in Search Results

Monitoring your SEO ranking can help you ensure that your website is visible in search engine results. 

More visibility leads to higher organic traffic, which increases your chances of conversions and sales.

Stay Ahead of Competitors

Monitoring your competitors’ SEO performance can give you an idea of what strategies they are using and how successful they are. 

Potentially letting you stay ahead of the competition by learning from their successes and failures.

Understand User Behavior

SEO monitoring can provide insight into user behavior by tracking metrics such as CTR, bounce rate, and time on page. 

This data allows you to understand which content resonates with users, plus how people are engaging with your website. So you can make more of the same or try a new strategy.

Find and Fix Technical SEO Issues

SEO monitoring can help you identify technical issues on your website. Such as broken links, duplicate content, or missing meta tags that could be affecting your search engine rankings.

Finding and fixing such issues will likely improve your site’s performance on Google. Boosting your traffic and revenue as a result.

Next, let’s explore some tools you can use to monitor your SEO performance and get results.

6 Best Tools for SEO Monitoring

There’s no shortage of SEO monitoring tools to choose from. We’ve rounded up the best SEO tools available out there to get you started.

Semrush’s Position Tracking

The Position Tracking tool identifies where you rank for specific keywords in SERPs. It includes functionalities like:

• Daily rank tracking
• SERP analysis
• Competitor comparison

Here’s how to use it.

Enter your domain and name your project. Click “Create project.”

The tool walks you through two steps. First, you choose your preferred settings and add your location. 

Next, you add your keywords and click “Start Tracking.”

On the dashboard, you’ll see the “Landscape” and “Overview” tabs. Plus other tabs where you can dive into more granular monitoring.

For example, clicking the “Lost” button under “Pages” will show you which pages fell in the SERP rankings.

Use the following tabs to track how your website performs in search results: 

• “Rankings Overview”: Where you rank in the SERPs

• “Rankings Distribution”: The number of keywords for which your domain ranks in the top three, 10, 20, and 100 positions, plus any changes to these numbers

• “Visibility”: Your visibility % against your competitors over time. The metric estimates how often these domains appear in online searches for specific keywords you’re tracking.

• “Share of Voice”: If you have a Business subscription, this feature will track your level of brand awareness over time. Based on the ratio of traffic your site receives from your target keywords to the total combined volume of all your keywords.

• “Competitors Discovery”: Here you’ll find all the domains that also rank for your target keywords—helping you identify and track your closest competitors.

Further reading: How to Use Semrush to Track Keywords and Positions

Semrush’s Domain Overview

The Domain Overview tool provides comprehensive insights into any domain’s online visibility. Including its organic search traffic, paid search activities, backlink profile, and main competitors. 

You get a bird’s-eye view of your competitors’ online presence to find potential growth opportunities.

Further reading: How to Expose Your Competitors in One Click with Domain Analytics

To get started, enter a domain URL. Then, hit “Search.”

The dashboard gives you a quick overview of a domain’s overall search engine presence— including domain authority score, backlinks, and traffic. 

In the other tabs, you can also:

• Compare domains to see how your website stacks up against the competition
• Generate a growth report to learn how competitors are progressing
• Compare domain performance by country to understand performance in other markets

Use this data to learn what your rivals do well. And what you can do better to outperform them.

Semrush’s Site Audit

The Site Audit tool is a treasure trove for anyone looking to uncover website issues. It crawls your site to flag errors, warnings, and notices. 

Site Audit scans a website’s technical infrastructure to identify broken links, security vulnerabilities, and on-page SEO inefficiencies, among other things.

You then get actionable insights to: 

• Optimize website performance
• Improve search engine rankings
• Enhance user experience (UX)

Here’s how to use it.

First, create a project and set up your site audit. 

Once that’s done, click “Start Site Audit.” When the tool has finished analyzing your site, you get an email confirming its completion.

The Site Audit dashboard looks like this:

“Site Health” gives you a benchmark to work with.

Use the “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices” tabs to find suggestions on how to improve your site’s SEO and overall health.

You’ll also find “Thematic Reports.” Where you can take a closer look at various technical SEO aspects:

Further reading: How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit (in 14 Steps)

Run a site audit periodically or whenever you make changes to your website (e.g., when adding or redesigning pages). It will help you ensure that any issues don’t impact your SEO efforts.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and optimize your website's performance in organic search results. 

It provides real-time SEO data that helps you diagnose any irregularities.

The following SEO reports and tools help you track performance: 

• Performance report: Provides access to metrics like total clicks, total impressions, average CTR, and average position
• URL Inspection Tool: Helps you check the index status of an individual page and troubleshoot indexing issues
• Page Indexing report: Shows you which pages Google can find and index, plus any related issues 
• Page Experience report: Provides information about your website’s performance in terms of UX
• Links report: Helps you track backlinks to your site

Google will email you if there are any issues with your website. So there’s no need to check Google Search Console daily. 

That said, it’s a good idea to log in every month or when you make changes to your site’s content. This will help you ensure your data is stable. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides information about your website’s visitors, their behavior, and activity.

The SEO platform collects data from your website (or app) and creates reports so you can analyze the results.

Here’s a crash course on where to find SEO performance data in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):

• Go to “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition” to view your organic search traffic 
• Navigate to “Engagement” > “Landing Pages” to see which pages receive the most organic traffic, and those with the highest bounce rates
• Click on “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition” > “Referrals” to see which external sites are driving traffic to your website
• Check “Tech” > “Overview” to gauge your site’s mobile performance and the split between mobile and desktop traffic 

Use Google Analytics to answer questions like: 

• Who was on your website?
• What did visitors do on your website?
• Where do your visitors come from?

You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. And use the data to improve your performance over time.

SEOquake

SEOquake is a free SEO plugin for Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Firefox providing instant organic search data.

Use the toolbar to dive deep into specific data points for a page. Including:

• Page info: Gives an overview of basic metrics, like age and last updated
• Diagnosis: Offers an on-pageSEO audit
• Internal/external links: Shows a breakdown of links on the page
• Compare domains: Lets you analyze multiple domains side-by-side

Once installed, visit any webpage and click the SEOquake icon on your browser toolbar. You’ll get an overview of key metrics such as Google Index, Bing Index, Alexa Rank, and many others.

To conduct SERP analysis, search for a keyword on Google or other search engines. For this example, we’ll use “minimal jewelry.”

SEOquake will display metrics below each search result. Helping you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the pages ranking for that keyword.

You can also export a full SERP report with parameters like backlinks and domain insights.

The “Density” feature provides insights into keyword density. To help you determine if a page is over-optimized or under-optimized for certain keywords.

Use SEOquake as a research tool to get quick information about a website’s traffic data and spot opportunities to improve. 

6 Important SEO Metrics to Monitor 

You’ve set up your SEO software. Now what?

With so much data available in the powerful tools above, it can be difficult to pinpoint what to keep an eye on.

Here are six top metrics you should track to keep your website’s search visibility moving in the right direction. Along with suggested software and steps for tracking them efficiently. 

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the number of users visiting your website. It tells you:

• How many people land on your pages
• Where they come from
• Which pages they visit most frequently
• How long they stay
• Where they exit your site

You can track organic traffic in Google Analytics reports, under “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.”

At its core, traffic flow—the fluctuations in your site visitors—is a pulse check. A consistent and increasing flow indicates your website is healthy, growing, and achieving its goals.

Monitoring traffic flowgives you a clear picture of what content resonates most with your audience. So you can better allocate resources and budgets for your content marketing efforts.

It can also pinpoint where visitors drop off your site. Allowing you to tweak your website’s design, content, and calls to action (CTA) to increase conversion opportunities.

Further reading: What Is Organic Traffic (And How to Increase It)

Keyword Rankings

Tracking keyword rankings gives you an idea of where your website ranks for specific keywords. And how that changes over time. 

It helps you understand which SEO tactics are working and which need improvement.

Semrush’s Position Tracking tool lets you monitor your keyword performance. Like this:

Follow this essential cycle to ensure your site is always well-optimized for your target keywords: 

• Evaluate which keywords drive the most traffic and which are falling short 
• Prioritize those you want to improve and make the necessary adjustments
• Track their performance over time
• Analyze your keyword SEO progress and repeat

Backlinks

Backlinks are among the most important factors for organic search ranking—like votes of confidence in the eyes of search engines. 

When another site links to yours, it’s essentially vouching for your site’s authority. Especially if these backlinks are from trusted, authoritative sources.

SEO monitoring can help you track new backlinks and identify any potential issues with existing ones.

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics gives a 360-degree view of your backlink performance. You can check your own site’s backlinks as well as your competitors’ to spot opportunities.

Keep an eye on things like who is linking to your site and how authoritative the websites are. Also, check if backlinks are increasing or dropping off.

Additionally, you can monitor your backlinks using the following Semrush tools:

• Backlink Audit: Helps you assess your site’s backlink profile and identify any suspicious links that can hurt your rankings
• Link Building Tool: Collects a list of link-building opportunities for your domain. And gives you a management interface for campaigns.
• Bulk Backlink Analysis: Analyzes up to 200 competitors at once (ideal for a crowded market)

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of website visits that don’t result in desired actions. Think failed link clicks, form submissions, and purchases.

Bounce rate isn’t a confirmed ranking factor. But a high bounce rate is often a symptom of weakness in other SEO factors. Like slow loading speed, low-quality webpage design or functionality, and poor mobile optimization.

So, it’s something you should monitor closely.

Check your bounce rate in GA4 reports by going to “Engagement” > “Pages and screens.”

Your ideal bounce rate depends on your industry, but ideally it should be as low as possible.

While 0% is unlikely, it’s helpful to know your industry averages. Here are some average bounce rates as an indication:

Site Exit Pages 

Site exit pages are the last page a visitor views before leaving your website. 

When combined with other metrics, such as bounce rate and time on page, this data can help you identify areas where you need to improve your site’s UX. 

For example:

A crucial page has a high number of exits for the traffic it’s getting. Improving its content, visuals, or CTAs should keep your visitors engaged for longer.

You can find your exit pages using Semrush’s Traffic Analytics Top Pages Report.

Navigate to “Top Pages.”

Scroll to find the “Exits” tab. Sort the page results by highest exit rate.

Look for commonalities across the top exit pages. Is there a specific type of content that doesn’t retain visitors? Are there technical issues that may deter users?

Consider using pop-up surveys or feedback tools on exit pages. Direct user feedback can provide invaluable insights into why they’re leaving.

Lastly, while high exit rates on certain pages might be concerning, it’s essential to contextualize the data. 

For instance, a high exit rate on a “Thank You” page after a successful purchase or signup is expected. 

Remember: Regularly monitor SEO and adapt your strategy based on this data so your website continually meets users’ needs and expectations. 

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and take a predetermined action. Like clicking a button, buying a product, or signing up for a newsletter.

Not all conversions contribute to revenue directly (e.g., an ebook download or newsletter signup). These are called micro conversions. 

They move your customer further along the sales process towards bigger, or macro, conversions. Like booking a demo or buying a product.

So it’s worth tracking both.

Further reading: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The Beginner’s Guide

Track conversion rates in GA4 reports by adding “Session conversion rate” to your “Traffic acquisition” reports. 

Follow the steps under “Conversion Rate” in our guide to Metrics in Google Analytics to get set up.

Monitor conversion rates to understand how your campaigns are performing. Spot non-converting pages so you can find and fix any issues. 

Keep a Pulse on Your SEO Performance

SEO monitoring is never a one-and-done effort. Keep a close watch on how your SEO efforts are growing (or not) over time.

Analyzing data and adjusting strategies on a regular basis is crucial. You’ll maintain a healthy website that attracts visitors, builds trust with search engines, and grows your business. 

Doing the legwork upfront pays off when you see your rankings and overall website performance improve. 

Explore the Semrush tool suite to track your website’s SEO efficiently and with ease.