An effective marketing strategy relies on having the appropriate mix of metrics that fit with your desired goals, such as search engine optimization (SEO). When applied to SEO specifically, this means taking concrete steps toward your ultimate objective of ranking higher in search results and reaching more potential customers on their buyer journey.
Installing the appropriate tracking code onto your website is key for collecting SEO performance data, and can give you insight into its performance – such as its SERP rank performance or how users are engaging with its content. SEO tracking tools such as Google Analytics provide extensive data that enables you to investigate user behaviors on an incredibly granular level.
Monitoring keyword rankings is another integral aspect of SEO monitoring. Doing this allows you to understand which keywords are driving traffic and make data-driven decisions on how best to optimize your content for those keywords.
Tracking keyword performance not only allows you to identify high-performing pages and keywords, but it can also reveal underperforming ones that may be negatively affecting your SEO ranking. When discovering pages that have dropped in SERP rankings due to redirection or penalties by search algorithm changes, using that data helps determine why this page has dropped off, whether due to redirection or an algorithmic update–so you can take appropriate actions against such issues as soon as they arise.
1. SpyFu
SpyFu is an essential tool for digital marketers looking to optimize the search performance of their businesses online. It offers features such as keyword research and competitor analysis.
SpyFu offers one of the many tools available, a ranking history feature that allows you to monitor where you and your competitors rank for specific keywords. This can help identify any shifts in rankings so you can take appropriate actions accordingly.
SpyFu offers a keyword grouping report, which groups similar paid search terms together. This allows you to identify the most profitable search terms for your competitors’ campaigns and gain access to any domain’s top pages, providing valuable insight into your competition’s content strategy. Unfortunately, SpyFu’s rank tracker lags behind other competitor analysis tools like Ahrefs; this may be a setback for some users.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free online tool provided by Google to website owners to gain insight into how their crawl, index, and serve their websites – providing an opportunity to optimize SEO strategies and ensure healthy websites.
Search Console provides businesses with valuable insights, including new keyword opportunities and ranking updates, while helping identify and resolve errors on their websites.
Some of its features include performance reports, index coverage reports and URL inspection. Furthermore, businesses can verify site ownership and submit a sitemap; remove pages from search results with meta no-index tags; link with Google Analytics so webmasters can gain keyword data; as well as utilize tools like disavow files management and sitemap management.
3. GTMetrix
GTmetrix is a web performance tool that utilizes Google Lighthouse metrics to assess your website and identify areas for improvement. Furthermore, GTmetrix gives insight into how your site performs from various perspectives (mobile devices and browsers) for improved user experience and increased SEO rankings.
This tool integrates multiple performance indicators to produce an overall page speed score and provide recommendations with detailed explanations on how to improve its performance. Furthermore, you can track its results over time to assess how changes to pages affect them.
GTmetrix goes beyond standard Lighthouse metrics by offering several additional unique features, including waterfall charts, video playback and historical tracking of test results. Furthermore, it supports custom user agents so you can emulate requests from various browsers – this helps identify any issues which otherwise would have been difficult to spot.
4. Hotjar
Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics solution that offers insight into user behaviour. Featuring heatmaps and visitor recordings to give an inside view of visitor interactions on websites, Hotjar makes qualitative data analysis simpler and more effective than ever.
Hotjar Move Heatmaps provide valuable insights into where and how visitors scroll on a website, providing invaluable assistance for optimizing page layout for conversions.
Hotjar can also detect which elements on a page aren’t receiving enough attention and why, giving businesses the ability to address any issues on their websites and mobile apps. Hotjar also provides form analytics, feedback widgets, and survey tools so businesses can collect feedback from website or app visitors to enhance user experience and increase customer engagement; Hotjar’s form analytics help collect this feedback directly while form widgets collect visitor insights allowing businesses to collect invaluable customer insight – this provides additional data points which allow for improved overall experience as well as pinpoint problems such as high bounce rates so they can identify solutions as soon as they arise!
5. Serpstat
Serpstat is one of the premier SEO monitoring tools available for content marketers. Offering in-depth competitor research and backlink analysis capabilities, keyword filters and the ability to specify conditions using AND or OR, Serpstat makes an invaluable addition to content marketers’ SEO arsenal.
The software offers an innovative feature to easily identify opportunities to increase ranking and traffic, detect on-page issues and optimize content for targeted keywords.
Serpstat stands out with its rank tracker, a feature which tracks domains’ search engine rankings in over 170 countries and helps improve your website’s visibility. The platform features an user-friendly user interface but may take time to load, and may sometimes become buggy.
6. SEO Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an essential tool for any serious SEO professional, crawling websites like search engine bots to identify issues that might impact search rankings and impact search rankings negatively. It can identify broken links, duplicate content and technical issues which other tools miss altogether.
Site analysis tools can also be used to inspect a website’s site architecture and internal link structure, which is essential for optimizing performance. You could use it, for instance, to locate pages with too many redirects or meta refreshes which cause 404 errors.
SERP mode is another useful feature that lets you see how page titles and descriptions will appear on search engines results pages, enabling you to ensure they don’t exceed pixel limitations or become cumbersome for readers. Furthermore, this information can be exported directly to Excel for further analysis.
7. Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to track search interest for a term over time and across geography and demographics, while providing other data such as related search queries and trending topics.
Discover new keywords for content creation, research potential products’ popularity or spot seasonal trends within any given niche – this tool can be especially helpful for ecommerce businesses.
Trending query graph data is normally normalized to account for anomalous phenomena like seldomly searched terms (which appear as zero searches over short periods), duplicate searches and searches containing apostrophes; it also excludes search queries that are identical or very similar. Google Trends is free and accessible to anyone with an active Google account; additionally it integrates seamlessly with other products from Google such as News, Shopping and Image Search to allow viewing trends at once.
8. Looker Studio
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is an analytics tool with multiple uses. It features various tools and functions designed to assist with monitoring client performance – this includes custom report generation as well as merging information from different sources into one single report.
Looker Studio allows you to connect to various data sources by selecting them from the ‘Data Sources’ tab on its homepage, such as Google Analytics, Search Console or YouTube. After connecting them you can use the Explorer tab for temporary storage of data analysis purposes.
Looker Studio is free for use, although a paid version may be beneficial when managing content at scale. Some users have reported experiencing lag when working on large projects; however, this should not be seen as a dealbreaker for most.
9. SEMRush
Semrush is a comprehensive SEO suite offering backlink analysis, keyword research and on-page SEO tools.
Market Explorer allows users to examine competitive landscape data and spot opportunities based on industry trends. Furthermore, it identifies top competitors and their ranking for specific keywords while showing how your website measures up against them.
SEMRush stands out from other rank tracking tools by offering you a ranking distribution report that details changes to Google search engine positions for each keyword over time, providing valuable insights into how your efforts have affected organic traffic and helping identify which keywords need work and any SEO edits’ effects on rankings. Furthermore, its site audit tool detects website errors as well as core web vitals – an invaluable resource that’s sure to benefit any organization!
10. Moz
Moz provides an insightful dashboard that easily presents SEO metrics and insights in an accessible format. As one of the most comprehensive monitoring tools on the market, it offers tools for keyword tracking, search intent analysis, on-page optimization, backlink analysis, competitor analysis and competitor intelligence monitoring.
Moz’s tool also allows you to generate advanced reports. Open Site Explorer provides an Open Spam Score which takes into account 17 factors Moz identified as being associated with spam. This can help avoid Google penalties that might reduce rankings.
Moz has an outstanding SEO monitoring feature with their Site Crawl feature that inspects websites for any issues such as broken links or slow pages, as well as providing a Chrome extension to show domain and page authority figures of each webpage you visit – this makes for an ideal SEO monitoring solution!