If you are doing SEO for any of your website, then keywords are one of the major metrics that can be measured to identify the progress of your SEO campaign. Your target keywords will be your primary focus while doing search engine optimization for your website and hence it is very much important to track your major keywords to make sure that your activities are going in the right direction.
There are various methods to track the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, but the overall performance of your seed keywords can really help you in understanding the situation better. An increase in the organic or overall traffic on your website can really tell you that your website is performing well and your SEO activities are effective. But an increase in the organic traffic might not be the correct answer to define the effectiveness of your SEO campaign as you really need to identify whether you are getting traffic from the variations of your important keywords.
There are various methods to find out whether your important keywords are faring better in the search engine results pages and you should indeed check out these things on a regular basis. Once we start our SEO campaigns, we often gets little time to track all the minute activities and search behaviors that affect our website and this is something that we need to give additional stress. Once you start monitoring the search trends and other information that can give you idea about the performance of your keywords, then you can really move things smoothly forward.
Here are some simple methods to track the performance of your major keywords for better assessment of your SEO campaign.
1) Keyword Ranking Report
We might all be creating reports for the client at the end of every month and we can know the effectiveness of our SEO campaign by simply running a keyword ranking report or keyword position report using any of the tool available. The keyword ranking position tells you how your important keywords are ranking in the major search engines. If the keywords are ranking high in the search results, then you can be pretty sure that your SEO activities are paying off. On the other hand, if your keywords are not ranking high you need to wait for some time or think about changing your SEO tactics. If you are able to compare the keyword rankings for a particular month against the previous 2 or 3 months, then you will get a clear picture about where your SEO campaigns are heading towards. For keyword ranking and comparison I use the position tracking tool offered by SEMRush, as it provide real insights into the keyword ranking and accurate comparison with previous months. There are also various other free keyword ranking tools, but SEMRush offers more realistic data which really tells about the progress of our keywords.
2) Organic Traffic Report from Web Analytics Tool
Most of the webmasters use any of the web analytics tool to track the flow of traffic and their behavior. A web analytics have become an inevitable tool of any business website and it gives more precise data and information regarding the traffic coming from various sources and geographical location. Google Analytics is one of the best and free web analytics tool available and majority of the webmasters use Google Analytics to track their website traffic. Google Analytics provides the details of keyword bringing traffic to your website and these details can provide insight into the performance of your website in search engine result pages. For the last 6 months Google Analytics does not show the keyword details that bring traffic to your website and this is mainly preserve user data. But still you can view the keyword report for Yahoo, Bing and other search engines to provide you a better picture about your keywords. In the case of keywords from Google, you can have a look at the landing pages coming from Google and see whether the pages associated with your important keywords are there. If the landing pages associated with your top keywords are present in the list, then you can keep your heads up and believe that your SEO activities are yielding the desired results.
3) Keyword Report from Webmaster Tool
Google webmaster tool is one of the most important tool when it comes to optimizing and analysing your website for better search engine results, especially from Google. We all integrate our websites with Google Webmaster tools and verify our website using any of the methods offered by this tool. By using Google’s Webmaster tool, we will be able to get more information regarding the external links, anchor text, crawl errors, broken links, index status, security issues etc. Apart from these, one of the most important metrics that is provided by the Webmaster tool is the search term information which includes the search keywords that brought traffic to the website for a particular period of time. By analyzing this data, a webmaster will easily be able to check whether his SEO efforts are producing the desired limits.
There are also many other ways to analyze the performance of your keywords, but that all are really complicated and the above mentioned easy steps are sufficient to measure the success of your SEO activities.
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