Tracking Your On-Page SEO

Performing on-page SEO on your website is important, but so is tracking what impact your optimization is having on your website’s performance. Otherwise, how are you going to know that what you are doing is working? Don’t leave it to chance, here’s how you can track your on-page SEO.

Start by tracking keywords

Keywords are one of the most important parts of on-page SEO, so it’s obviously necessary to track them. The best place to start is Google’s Search Console, which provides a free and fast way to see which keywords your pages are ranking for.

Aside from Google’s Search Console, there are plenty of paid tools that you can use to track how well you rank for keywords. Thee paid tools will include more advanced features, too, like ranking history, alerts when your rank drops and location-specific ranking data.

Don’t just look at your website as a whole, it’s important to track each page individually. In doing so, you can identify the worst performing pages and then link to them from your best-performing pages in order to give them a boost.

Check your organic traffic

The whole point of on-page SEO is to increase the amount of organic traffic that you get from Google and other search engines. Naturally, it’s important to track this traffic carefully to see how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and how long they are staying on your site.

On top of this, you should also be tracking the bounce rate of your website and specific pages individually. Your bounce rate is the number of people who leave a page without taking any further action. A high bounce rate is bad. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you have when you have a high bounce rate as most users aren’t sticking around.

Bounce rates can vary tremendously from website to website and will also depend on the type of page. So you can get an idea of how well your website is performing, the following are some industry benchmarks:

• Blogs– 65% to 90%
• Landing pages – 60% to 90%
• Content websites – 35% to 60%
• Lead generation websites – 30% to 55%
• Business to business (B2B) websites – 25% to 55%
• E-commerce and retail websites – 20% to 45%

Look at pages per session

The pages per session metric measures the number of pages an individual user looks at while browsing your website. It’s a great way to see how easy it is to get around your website and how engaging it is, too.

If pages per session are low, there are several tactics you could use to increase the number. These can include creating more internal links, creating better content and improving your website’s design.

Final words

Tracking your on-page SEO is hugely important. There’s no point in doing all of the work in the first place if you aren’t going to see whether that work is paying off. Bear in mind, however, that it can take a long time to see results when it comes to on-page optimization. So track your results but be patient, too.