How to Track SEO Performance?

- Jack from Rank Math shows the key metrics to watch out for in the Google Analytics search console and rank math analytics to know if your SEO efforts are fetching results. - Speaker A tells people what other metrics they need to look out for in Google Analytics. They focus on organic search traffic and compare the traffic against a year prior. The number of sessions has decreased but the engage session has increased. - The engagement rate has increased by 47%, but the average time users are engaged has slightly decreased. We want to identify pages that cause the drop in organic search traffic by visiting the pages and screens tab. - We want to add one more metric, the bounce rate, to the report. The bounce rate in the old Google Analytics reports, which is called universal analytics, means different things. - Speaker A tells Speaker B to monitor the 404 pages and look at external broken links. Speaker B recommends a plugin called broken link checker to check if there are broken links on the website. - In the index status tab, check the indexability of the site and check other issues, such as the URL is unknown to Google and the robots TXT status. Also, check out the core web vitals and the HTTPs status.

When you run a blog, be it for personal or for business use, it is super important for you to know if your SEO efforts are fetching results. And in this video we will show you the key metrics you need to watch out for in your Google Analytics search console and rank math analytics so that you can really understand if your site is growing or not. Let's go. Hey, it's Jack from Rank Math, the one tool that brings you easy to use SEO and AI tools. And this channel provides you with tips, tricks and tutorials to grow your search traffic. So if you're new to us, subscribe now. Our assumption for this video is that you have already connected your site with Google Analytics and search console and if you have not done that, we recommend watching this video right here to get them set up. Alright, let's cut to the chase and check out what other metrics you need to look out for in Google Analytics. Organic traffic shows how many users find your website through search engines. It is a direct indicator of your SEO performance. So let's visit Google Analytics. You want to hover to the left menu and select reports. If the left menu is collapsed, you want to click on this to expand it. Then on acquisitions and traffic acquisition, you will see the total number of users who arrive on your site through different mediums. What we should focus on is the organic search traffic. Now, this information is not as helpful unless you have something to compare it with. So you have to hover over the date range. Click on it, scroll down and you will see the compare feature you want to turn this on. As you can see, we are currently at the last 28 days worth of information and it will be helpful if you compare the traffic against a year prior. So we will change the dates accordingly. As you can see, we are comparing the data of September this year to the data of the same period last year. Let's hit apply and now let's focus on the organic search data starting with sessions. It represents any visits to your website. Basically, a session starts when a user lands on your site. As you can see, the number of sessions has decreased by 17%. However, in the engage session, which means users who have actually done meaningful interactions with your content has increased by over 21%. And this means that even though lesser people are visiting your site, more people are actually engaged and consuming your content. And this could mean that your content may be highly relevant to your audience. On the other hand, it could mean that some low engagement pages are losing traffic. So you have to check which pages are responsible for the drop in traffic. And maybe visit them to update the information. So this could be an indicator for you to check which pages of your site are losing traffic. Also, the engagement rate has increased by 47%, which may indicate that our content is doing a much better job of keeping users interested. So think back on what you have done in a period of a year as a result of the increase and keep doing the same thing. And while the engagement rate has improved, the average time users are engaged has slightly decreased. This suggests that users may find what they need faster, or if they are skipping over important parts of your content, or if certain pages have lost their depth. So with just some data, we can get many insights into the SEO performance. And if you are looking for a detailed Google Analytics tutorial, maybe because we didn't explain every single metric, you can check out this video right here. The link is in the description. All right, now that we have an overall understanding of the organic search traffic, let's hone into the performance of specific pages. We want to identify pages that cause the drop in organic search traffic. So we will open up the engagement report and visit the pages and screens tab. Let's expand the number of rows to the maximum so that we do not have to flip pages. And one more thing. As you can see, these are the metrics we have. We want to add one more metric to the report, which is the bounce rate. So let's head over to the top right and click on the customize report button. Then click on metrics and add a metric. Let's search for bounce rate. And here we go. Of course, if you run an ecommerce store, you can add these other metrics as well to see which other pages that got you the most sales. Anyway, hit apply and save. Now let's go back now. The bounce rate in the old Google Analytics reports, which is called universal analytics, and the bounce rate in the GA four mean different things. The bounce rate in GA four means the percentage of sessions that were not engaged, meaning the user did not spend at least 10 seconds on the site, did not view more than one page, and did not trigger a conversion event. In the old report, bounce rate means percentage of users who leave the site after viewing only one page. So that's a huge difference. Okay, now since we are identifying pages that lost traffic, we will sort the data by the number of views by clicking on this. So we are sorting the data by the least number of views to the most. And from here you can discover pages that have lost traffic since last year, which are these two pages. And for those pages that did not even get a single visit. We will want to visit them and update the content. Now you need to take into account the bounce rate as well. You see, there were three people who visited the page and the bounce rate was 33.33% which means two out of three people were engaged users. And for the engaged users, the average engagement time is only 13 seconds, which means there is a likelihood that the content is outdated or not relevant. That's why nobody is reading it anymore. The same goes for this as well. Now for this, there might be some tracking issues here. When you have one active user, you should have one view. But anyway, this shows that the user has spent 25 seconds on a page so there is no bounce rate. But honestly the numbers are too low to gauge anything. But if there were more data, having low bounce rate and high engagement time could mean that the page has good content but needs to optimize for more keywords to get more traffic, which we will show you how in a while. So go through the list of pages and figure out which other ones you need to work on. Once you have identified those pages, the next metric will be found in the Google search console. Want to know what keywords your page has ranked for on your search console? Click on the performance tab, then click on pages. Let's visit the pages we need to optimize based on the data we have collected from Google Analytics. Let's say this and here are all the keywords your page has been ranking for. Let's go through some metrics. The meaning of total clicks is straightforward. Total impressions mean how many times your page meets the eye of the user when they search for the keyword. For example, if someone searched for underserved niches and your page appears to be on the second page of a search results, if the user didn't visit the second page, it is not considered impression. But if the person visits the second page and your results appear here, it is considered an impression anyway. The average CTR or click through rate means the percentage of people who click on your page on a search result when they saw it, and the average position means the average ranking position for the keyword over the period you have selected. By default, the click through rate and the average position data will not be added to the report. As you can see, there's no click through rate and average position here, so you have to click on these two to add them to the report. And here we go. So based on this, 63 people saw my article on the search engines but 15 clicked, which is a click through rate of 23.8%, which is quite a good number given the average position is 25. Now this set of data might show that the meta title and description of the page has done well for this keyword. So we have to visit the page and optimize for this keyword to bring up the average position of the keyword you see with every data you can paint a picture. Now let's go to this keyword. As you can see, the average position of this keyword is three. But why is the click through rate so low? Out of 46 people who saw the page, only seven clicked. Maybe something is wrong with the meta title and description. Maybe I need to add the underserved niches keyword in the title to make it more relevant. This may increase the click through rate, so take notice of the click through rate and compare it with the average position and you can paint a picture of what needs to be optimized. The thing is, if the page is in the top ten position but the click through rate is dismal, this may suggest issues with the meta title and description. Or maybe there is a high authority or government site ranking at the first position that is giving all the information needed so they don't have to check out the other pages on the search results page. If the page is ranked on the second or third page of Google and with low click through rates, you would have to visit the page and optimize or maybe revamp or update the page content. It is important to monitor your broken links to see if you are losing traffic unknowingly and wastefully. As a rank math user, you have access to the 404 monitor too, and if you have not turned it on, we recommend that you do. So let's visit the module. Now we are looking at all the links that are served with the 404 error, which means these are the links your site visitors try to visit, but they are not found on your site. Some are caused by bots. They are quite obvious and we shouldn't worry about them. But some are legitimate, such as something like these. You can sort them based on the number of hits to find which other pages they are most often visited. Hmm, so it seems that many people are trying to access my returns and refunds page. I so let's check it out. Yep, this is a 404 all right, but that is weird because I have a refund and return policy page that is active. So because there is a high volume of people visiting that 404 page and I presume it will continue to grow, I have to fix this issue. I have to click on redirect and it will bring me to the redirections module in rank math. So the source URL is already added. So all I need to do is to copy the link of the correct page and paste it in the destination URL field, keep the redirections typed as 301 since the redirection is permanent and create the redirection. So now whenever someone lands on the page that was previously a 404 page, they will be redirected to the correct page. You should always monitor your 404 pages and make sure that you do not lose unnecessary traffic. Monitoring internal 404 pages is not the only thing you should look at. You should also look at external broken links, meaning links from external sites that you have added to your pages but now they have become 404 pages. We recommend that you install a plugin called broken link checker by WPMU dev. With it it will scan your website and let you know if you have broken links on your site, be it internal or external broken links as you can see, I've previously added a link to the CDC website on this page, but now that page is a 404 page so I can easily edit the URL and paste in the URL that is now active and relevant and update it. Now technical SEO is a wide topic so I will just focus on those things you need to constantly track. First is the index status of your site. If you have rank math Pro installed on your site, you can simply go to the analytics module, visit the index status tab. In it you will see the indexability of your site. You want to focus on those issues that are stopping your links from being crawled or indexed, such as the URL is unknown to Google so we can sort the results by the issues and here we go. You want to look through the list to find if there are links that are supposed to be indexed but were ignored, such as this and this. You can click on it to see if there is something blocking the robots from crawling and indexing the page and if there is no information you can get out of this then you will have to request this page for indexing on the Google search console. Check other issues as well to make sure that all the pages that are supposed to be indexed do not land on one of these issues other than submitted and indexed. We have created many videos about solving indexing issues, so if you ever encounter any of these issues, feel free to check out the links in the description. Now, other than indexability, you should also check out other status as well, such as when you visit your Google search console, check out the page experience tab and you will see if there are any issues with your core web vitals and the HTTPs status. The core web vitals mainly deal with the site speed issues, so if you have a neat improvement or poor metric here which is the color other than green, you will have to click through to see which other pages being flagged with those metrics and you will need to fix them. If you have troubles fixing your site speed issues, we recommend watching this video right here. I believe with the tips we shared you should be able to fix the issues yourself. The link is in the description anyway. If the HTTPs metric is not good, which means some of your pages are not secured for users to visit, you will have to click on it and see which are those pages. Once you have identified them, take a screenshot and you may want to bring it to your web host to help you fix the issue. Also another thing for technical SEO, you want to check out the sitemaps tab to see if there are any issues with your XML sitemap status. In this case, the status for the sitemap is couldn't fetch so you have to manually add the new sitemap here. To find the sitemap link in rank mathematic under rank math SEO and click on the sitemap settings and right here this is the link to your sitemap index and it is the link you need to submit in your Google search console. One more thing, in your search console you also want to click on settings and check the robots TXT status. Open up the report and see if there are any issues. As you can see, Google is able to fetch the robots txt of the site, but there is an issue here. Click on it and it shows that one of the rules has been ignored by Googlebot, so maybe there is no reason to have that rule there. This will highlight all the warning and critical issues in the robots TXT file. If you see no issues then congratulations. There are two types of links you should monitor on your site. The first is internal links and when talking about internal links we want to make sure that all the pages have internal links pointing to them. Those pages that do not have any internal links pointing to them are called orphan pages. So to find orphan pages on your site, if you have rank math pro installed, simply visit your post list at the rank math filters. You want to select orphan post and as you hit filter you will see all the orphan pages. The next step is for you to find relevant posts or pages on your site to link to these pages. If you do not have rank math pro. Then look at these metrics here in the SEO details column and if you do not see this column you can expand the screen options. Check this SEO details and hit apply. Now the first two icons are the number of internal links and external links added on the page itself. However, the last icon, the incoming links, represents the number of pages on your site linking to this page. So if this is zero then it is an orphan page. The next type of links you should track are external links, meaning external websites linking back to your site. SEO professionals will call them backlinks. To do that, you need to visit your Google search console and scroll down and click on the links tab. Everything on the left relates to external links and everything on the right represents the internal links. The top link pages on the left are the pages that have gotten the most backlinks at the top link pages. On the right are the pages that have the most internal links. Of course, the idea is to find the page that has the highest backlinks and have a logical and relevant internal link to the page with the most internal links so that the link equity will be distributed to other pages of your site. However, what we should be looking at is at the bottom which is the top linking text. You want to expand the report and check the anchor text distribution. It should contain a mix of branded anchors which are the website names, then generic anchors which are the click here. Read more or in this case detailed article, as well as keyword reach anchors, which are keywords you would typically rank for like the bacterial drain cleaners or the top ten most energy efficient refrigerators. If you see that the majority of the anchor tags are exact match keywords, like all the anchor tags here are keyword reach, then it could indicate over optimization which Google could penalize. So a natural backlink profile should have a balance of different anchor tags. So these are the things you should constantly track to understand and improve your SEO results. If you have any questions or you like to share the metrics we have not talked about, do let us know in the comments. And don't forget to smash that thumbs up. We are all about helping you grow your search traffic on this channel. So if you haven't subscribed to us, do so. This is Jack from range math. I'll see you in the next video.