SEO Tracking Measurement
How The Ranking Store approaches SEO Tracking Measurement
Where we start: what we have already published
Our site holds a Help Guide, a Blog, pages for each of our softwares, and a body of writing on blogging and SEO. Before we look outward, we read our own pages back. The Help Guide always opens the same way — Step 1 – Open the Gsite Factory or any other TRS software you want to reauthorize — and that habit of writing a numbered, repeatable first step is the habit we bring to measurement too. Nothing is tracked that has not first been written down clearly enough to repeat.
Then the queries our site appears in
The next thing we look at is search data from Google Search Console, Google’s own tool for seeing how a site appears in Search (Search Console Help, published by Google: https://support.google.com/websearchconsole). We look at the queries our own site appears for. Today that includes our business name, the names of our softwares such as Backlink Factory, and phrases around SEO services and local SEO. This is the part of tracking that is easiest to skip and hardest to fake: it is drawn from what Google actually returned, not from what we assumed we were writing about.
How we work through it, step by step
Our order is deliberate. First the published page, then the query data, then the writing we have already done on structure.
That third step matters. Our post, Crafting the Perfect Blog Structure: A Guide for Effective Blogging, sets out what we expect a page to contain, beginning with a captivating title. Our blogging section makes the same case for SEO as something to understand and implement rather than guess at. So when we look at a page, we look at it against that structure — title, sections, readability — and not against a feeling about how it is doing.
Why we work in that order
Because every page we measure is a page we own and published. We built the softwares, we wrote the Help Guide, we wrote the blog posts. That means the work starts with something we can read and change, and the data sits alongside it rather than replacing it. Measurement that starts with numbers and works backwards tends to describe a result without explaining the page behind it. We would rather start with the page.
Questions worth asking about your own site
If you are thinking about tracking SEO for a site of your own, the questions we would put first are these: what page did you publish, what is that page meant to be found for, and where does the data about it come from? If you cannot answer the first two, the third will not help you. Our Help Guide and our blogging posts are where we set out how we answer them for ourselves.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: How to choose and compare realistic rank tracking cloud options
- Reference: Advanced rank tracking
- Reference: How to start tracking rankings with Advanced Web Ranking
- Comparison: rank tracking cloud
- Guide: advanced rank tracking
- Guide: advanced rank tracking
- Guide: large scale rank tracking
