How to Consistently Monitor and Improve Your Website's Search Position

Intro

With search engine optimization (SEO), the name of the game is climbing the search engine result pages (SERPs). The entire purpose of creating an SEO campaign is to claim Google's top spot in a variety of target keywords.

However, a major part of doing so is constantly monitoring your website's search position so you can improve its rankings. Fortunately, doing both at the same time isn't difficult.

In this guide, we'll share several tips to help you monitor your online performance and make the necessary adjustments to your campaign.

Create a Set Monitoring Schedule

It's essential for your marketing team to have a solid employee schedule so someone is checking their website's search position weekly.

Why? Consistency is key. Setting aside time to check in weekly gives you the best overview of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.

Plus, it gives you a chance to try ‌and understand Google's complex algorithm.

Also, this is the perfect time for your SEO team to conduct keyword research and optimize the title tags, meta tags, and descriptions of the content of your blog posts and pages. Create a checklist of tasks to help you nail every aspect of your monitoring strategy and stay on track.

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Including relevant keywords in your website's content will improve your website's search rankings.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

Another important aspect of monitoring and improving your website's search position is to ensure that your website is secure and trustworthy.

That means that you should use encryption and authentication protocols to protect your data and your user's data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks.

One of the common ways to do this is to use single sign-on (SSO) for your website, which allows your users to log in using their existing credentials from another service, such as Google or Facebook. However, there are different standards for implementing SSO, such as OAuth vs. SAML.

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These two protocols have different advantages and disadvantages depending on your use case, such as the type of application, the number of identity providers, and the level of complexity.

Overall, increasing your website's security can have a profound effect on its reputation and user experience. Plus, Google won't recommend your site if it thinks it's spammy or malicious.

Set Monitoring Goals

If you're just getting started with SEO monitoring, you'll need to first set some clear objectives. Generally speaking, what exactly are you hoping to achieve with your SEO campaign?

• Are you trying to build more links?
• Do you want to drive more organic traffic to your website?
• Do you want to understand the effectiveness of your thought leadership content?

Whatever your objective is, you should set precise monitoring goals.

For example, how many will fit your objective if you want to build more links? Are you looking into the domain authority (DA) of each link publisher?

Also, if you want to measure the effectiveness of your thought leadership content in search queries, what metrics are you tracking?

Do you value website traffic or conversions more? Setting clear goals is the precursor to monitoring your site's search position and figuring out ways to improve.

Invest in a Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research tools like Ranktacker, Semrush, and Ahrefs do more than just facilitate search term reports. You can use the Keyword Finder tool to learn everything about how to rank for your target keywords.

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For example, many tools offer a keyword gap analysis feature. In a nutshell, this feature provides in-depth information about how your website stacks up against your top competitors.

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For example, let's say that you want to rank higher for a list of seven target keywords. By using this feature, you can see how your website and competitors are ranking to either:

• Take advantage of low-hanging fruit keywords
• Strategize ways to surpass your competitors by creating better content

Investing in a high-quality keyword research tool can help you accomplish both of these important goals.

Perform Regular SEO Audits

An SEO audit is a diagnostic tool to observe your website's strengths and weaknesses. Similar to how people go to the doctor for a routine checkup, the purpose of an SEO audit is to check the overall health of your website.

With that said, you should avoid conducting annual SEO audits. While it takes a while for SEO results to appear, you should still be mindful of the progress your campaign is making, as well as the immediate changes you can make to your website.

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Thus, perform weekly SEO audits instead (as we mentioned earlier). By doing so, SEOs can gain a clear picture of how their campaign is improving and what changes need to be made to meet core objectives and ROI.

Closely Monitor Your On-Page SEO Vitals

The core web vitals on your website pages will ultimately affect its ranking in the SERPs. Here are the most common on-page SEO elements:

• Meta tags: These are HTML tags that define what your website pages are about to search engine crawlers.
• Headings: These are smaller classifications that break up content for both search engines and human readers.
• Content quality: This is‌ the most important on-page SEO factor. Content quality is measured through various factors, such as mobile usability, bounce rate, and dwell time.
• Keyword usage: This metric details how much you use your target keywords throughout your website. Another term for this would be keyword density.

Search engine crawlers scan on-page SEO factors regularly. Keeping them up to par will help you improve your website's search position in the long run.

Don't Forget About Brand Tracking

SEO monitoring doesn't just involve on-page factors like keyword usage and content quality. There are a lot of off-page factors at play as well.

One of the most common off-page SEO factors to keep an eye on is brand mentions. Google indexes trillions of website pages every day, meaning they'll notice if your company receives a sizable bump in brand mentions over a period of time.

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This is one of the reasons digital public relations (PR) can influence your website's ranking. As a result, make sure you are tracking:

• Brand mentions
• DA
• Online sentiment

That way, you can receive a boost in your website's search position from off-page factors.

Use an On-Page Checklist

We've touched ‌on the importance of monitoring your website's on-page elements. Before and after this process, you should maintain an on-page checklist.

An on-page checklist is a series of to-do items that can benefit your website's performance in the SERPs. Every on-page checklist looks different, and its criteria are mostly based on your findings from a keyword research tool.

Ranktracker provides all the information you need to develop the right on-page checklist.

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Using this tool, you can receive an on-page analysis report with the following information:

• Overview: A summary of your website's on-page status. You can review this section to find specific areas of your website that need improvement.
• Optimization ideas: These are suggestions you can employ to improve your website's search position. Optimization ideas can include adding a primary keyword to a meta tag, finding broken links, or increasing the word count of a website page.
• Top 10 benchmarking: This tab compares your website's on-page performance to your top competitors.
• Idea tasks: This tab lists your progress in achieving your optimization ideas.

Your on-page checklist should change as you progress toward your campaign's core objectives.

Target High-Quality Publishers

A major part of any SEO strategy is to build and track quality links. To do that, you need to find publishers that are already creating great content.

Getting a backlink from a high-quality publisher shows Google that your content is trustworthy. It's a vote of confidence that drives more organic traffic to your website. When you're developing a link building strategy, make sure to follow these tips:

• Target reputable publishers with a DA of at least 45.
• Strive to get links from publishers with a “.edu” or “.gov” domain.
• Before you submit a pitch, study a publisher's website and main content.

Quality links don't come easy. Nonetheless, the most successful websites acquire links from industry-leading publishers. If you need help building high-quality links, invest in a link building agency like uSERP to do the heavy lifting.

Don't Forget About Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimization process of improving a website's crawlability. Simply put, the primary goal of a technical SEO campaign is to make it possible for search engine spiders to crawl a website efficiently.

The most common technical SEO factors include:

• Website speed
• Mobile usability
• Sitemaps
• Site structure
• Canonical tags

There are countless more technical SEO factors to consider, and most can be found in an SEO audit or Google Search Console. In any case, you'll need to put a great deal of effort into determining which improvements can be made to your website's technical side.

But it's worth the effort because excelling in technical SEO prevents Google from ignoring your website pages.

Final Words

Whether you're an SEO or business owner, it's important to closely monitor your website's search position. Only then can you work to make improvements, refine your strategy, and surpass your online competitors.

Using the tips outlined in this guide, you should have all the strategies you need to accomplish your SEO goals. Now, it's time to adapt your SEO strategy accordingly and achieve your desired marketing and business goals.

Here's to your online success!