SEO For Developers Endgame: Tracking Your SEO Progress

Previously, we discussed the importance of creating content that resonates with your audience and ranks well on search engines. With your content strategy in place, it’s time to focus on the final piece of the SEO puzzle—tracking and analyzing your progress.

Introduction

It’s time for the most important part of SEO, following up on your strategies and adjust based on results. Because SEO it’s not something to do once and then forget about it. Monitoring your SEO statistics is the key factor for consistent grow and improvements. You’ll want to keep doing all of the things we’ve touched on our last articles, like creating well-structured HTML, creating readable and enjoyable content, and now, use the data provided by visitors and the tools we initially mentioned. This will help you take data-based decisions, to make sure you’re improving areas that can generate a huge different in your ranks.

Now, let’s do this one last time: Let’s learn how to track, improve, and measure your SEO success.

Check your bounce rates

The bounce rate refers to basically abandoment of your site, a person enters to a page, sees it for a minute, and then goes back again to Google. What could be causing this? Is for you to decipher, and try. With the tools you have, you can check what search query made them land in that page, and ensure that the page actually talks about what they were looking for. You can also test for the content, is it too small, large, or complex? And lastly, you can always try to see if recordings of sessions within that page shine some light into issues users might running into, or degrading their experience, this can help you fix that.

Analyze Bounce Rates

As we previously defined in this article, Bounce Rates is the amount of users that visit a page for little to no time, and then abandon the website entirely. By using the tools provided in the first section, and what the underlying issue can be, we can address it directly, and get rid this issue.

For example, let’s say you created a piece of content that it’s ranking on Google, but it’s getting increasingly higher bounce rates. How do we fix this? We’ll need to check out what search queries is the content ranking for, and make sure that it’s answering the question that the user might be looking for. If it’s not, we can always tweak the content, and see how more people react. Other issues such as errors on the page, or loading times, can be addressed by looking into recordings from Microsoft Clarity, and making sure users are having he correct experience.

Evaluate Search Query Performance

If you find yourself creating content that doesn’t rank, check the current search queries you are ranking, and the content that people are looking for. One of the most common issues in here, is that the content might not appeal to their needs, and so, they’re not engaging with it. To fix this, create content that answers more directly the search queries they’re looking for, and improve the existing content to acknowledge these search queries too.

Don’t focus only on bad performing content, be also on the look out for well performing content, so you can further optimize, and create content related to that topic that might boost your overall ranking within that topic. This way, you’ll not only be helping bad performing content, but ensuring the content is the performing well can stay relevant and fresh, to acknowledge, and expand the search queries that are bringing you traffic.

Continuosly Improve page speed

I know that many developers constantly fight with Google’s Page Speed tool or GTMetrix, but instead of banging your ahead against this tools, it’s important that you test for them consistently, to be aware of issues that might arise and affect users navigation. If you have uploaded a particularly large image without knowing, or disabled functionalities related to page speed while testing something, it’s good that you keep an eye checking to see if there’s anything you could do to improve the usage of your site.

Continously Improve loading times and page speed

I know about many developers fighting to get that 100% in Google’s Page Speed and GTMetrix, is reality, the numbers and stadistics that these tools show you will be always changing. For example, you may upload a larger image than before without realizing, or deactivate some functionality that affects loading times. This is why you should test consistently for loading times, and fix these issues progressively, instead of taking a lot of time at it. Testing this consistently will give you an understanding of what works, what can also affect your loading times, and what issues to avoid in the future, further improving your knowledge on making your website feel faster to use.

Go over the contents of this and previous blog posts

I’m super glad you’ve read all of this blog post, and I sincerely hope that all of the information here provided, can help you rank you websites more easily. And also get a deeper understanding of the inner workings of SEO, Google, and everything needed to have a website that is well positioned within search engines.

There’s a lot of other things I’d like to touch on, but I wanted to keep in a more closed enviroment so I wouldn’t go over things that might get the false appearance of being more related to spam. That’s why I fouces this article on what SEO should be all about: Creating content that people are glad to read, share around, and create an audience that engages with your website.

For all the time that I’ve created articles, I always had blogs that I found myself going back into, and as thank you, to them for sharing so much free knowledge on the subject. And to you, for reading this and previous articles, I want to give you my not so secret list of SEO Blogs that I read everyday:

• Neil Patel: Neil patel has created a huge empire from just SEO and creating content, I’ve been following him for a good time now and he always gives information that it’s digestable, easy to read, and most importantly, super actionable.
• Semrush: Semrush is my professional go-to when it comes to SEO, their team of writes really understand how the SEO game is played, I’ve haven’t found nothing else than just pure gold on this blog. Although more technical, it’s an amazing place to learn.
• Moz: Moz not only offers free training for SEO, they’re also the creators of various tools that will make sure you get a deeper understanding of your website, the value that it provides, and how it’s looked at in terms of the authority of the content you have. This one is also more technical, but if you find a good pacing to read their articles and know the basics of SEO; you will find their content is really powerful.
• Hubspot: Hubspot has won a part of my heart over all the years that I’ve used their CRM, and read their post. They really put a lot of thought into creating their articles, and they everything from beginner content, to more packed and expert oriented information. It’s a website that I visit to this day, and a CRM that I use also consistently.