The Value of Keyword Tracking vs. Onsite SEO Reporting

Tony Fazzini - April 19, 2016

Defining keywords for your SEO strategy is the foundation for quality Organic traffic.  Measuring the success of your Organic traffic is a multi-prong approach and takes several report types to make sure you’re getting the most information.

Keyword Tracking:

Keyword tracking reports allow you to see how keywords rank within search engines for your website.  These reports are extremely helpful to understand where your website ranks historically and, as changes are made, how the ranking changes.  In addition, it is important to see what pages rank for specific terms to make sure that the appropriate content is available for the proper keyword you would like to focus on.  While these reports are a great way to see rankings, what about the on-page experience once these users reach the website?

Onsite SEO Reporting:

These reports are incredibly useful and arguably the most important piece from a reporting aspect. While it’s great to rank well in search engines, if the traffic is not engaged on-site, or converting, there really isn’t value to your strategy. One of the more common on-site reporting tools is Google Analytics, which allows you to track all website activity from any source that may send traffic to your website. Using this tool specifically, businesses can track Organic performance by each landing page. Understanding what each landing page offers to the website allows you to see how each targeted keyword is helping you gain traffic as well as if the traffic is valuable.

You will want to review metrics like time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit to really understand if traffic is relevant based on the keywords used to find the website. If you see high bounce rates and poor time on site, it may make sense to review your keyword strategy to see if this can be improved upon. In addition, if you see very low site traffic to certain pages it may also make sense to review your keywords to see if there is a better fit that has more search volume.

Keywords should be reviewed often but changed seldom.  It is important to identify the best keywords for the website, optimize, and monitor traffic over a long period of time (such as a year or more).