MKT 420 Book Review Post 5

Tracking and Managing SEO

Once you have optimized your site the work is not over. The internet is a fast moving and fast changing place. Keeping track of your site will make sure that you make the appropriate changes to your site. The first thing that you would want to do is get some sort of analytics tracking software. There are many different kinds of there but one of the most popular is Google Analytics, and it is free.

Installing analytics to your site will provide you with information about who is coming to your site, where they are coming from, how long they stayed on the site, what types of keywords they searched for, and so on. There are six metrics that are good to stay aware of when starting out with analytics.



Visitors – Very simply this will tell you how many visitors have been to your site since you installed the analytics.



Pageviews and Landing Pages – Pageviews is how many times a page has been viewed. The more times people view a page the more popular it gets (Miller). This will give you good insight on how pages are performing. If a page has a low page view you might want to look at it and see what might be keeping people away. Landing pages is determined by which page the visitor came to when they came to the site. This will give you insight at how people are getting to your site and where they came from to get there.

Visit Length – How long a person stays on the site is a key factor as well. The goal is to have people spend a lot of time on your site but it is easier said than done. What was the person’s length of the visit, what pages did they view? (Miller) If a person doesn't stay long and only viewed one page, then maybe you should take a look at that page and see if there is some confusion.



Referral Sites – Referral sites are sites that are referring traffic to your site (Miller). This could be another site with a link to your site on it. Referral sites are good to know because you want to see where your traffic is coming from and in particular why they are coming to your site.

Keywords – Check and see which keywords people are using to find your site. From there you can determine if you want to add anymore keywords, or put some emphasis on others. (Miller)



Inbound Link – It is good to know who is linking to your site and how they are linking. Which pages are they linking to and how people are getting there. This will give you a good idea of what other people think is important about your site. (Miller)



This is a good place to start tracking the activity on your site and a good place to start maintaining your site. There are many factors that can change your SEO new competitors, customers evolve, customer base shrinks, competitors get better, search engines change, these are all good factors of why you should maintain your site (Miller). It is a good idea to make a SEO plan for your site. Check your analytics a couple times a week, stay up to date with search engine updates and changes, and try to set goals that you want to achieve with your site. Use the analytics not to just track your site’s activity but to improve it. With the steps that have been outlined throughout these posts will give you a good place to start building your SEO.