Exactly How Often You Should Review SEO Analytics To Maximize Growth
SEO can feel like climbing mountains.
One day you’re at the top of the mountain, looking out at all the plebeians as they scramble up to chase you.
The next week? You’re one of those plebeians, 100 yards from the summit looking up at some other website planting their flag.
SEO analytics are like your navigation system up the mountain.
- If you don’t check your SEO analytics enough, you might find yourself on a completely different mountain
- If you check them too much, you’ll over-analyze every choice you make which will slow you down
To make sure you’re navigating to the summit as quickly and safely as possible, how often should you be reviewing your SEO analytics? This guide explains.
Contents
First, What Analytics Are You Reviewing?
This is important. Don’t skip this section. A lot of folks look at the wrong analytics.
Most people will immediately say:
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
And, while that’s kinda true, there’s many more KPIs you should be looking at.
I wrote an entire article about SEO KPIs on Agency Analytics’ website. But there are a LOT of KPIs and analytics you can track…
- Keyword rankings
- Total number of keywords ranking on Google
- Individual keyword ranking positions
- SERP impressions
- SERP CTR
- Time on page / bounce rate
- Website load speed
- Google Business Profile:
- Direction requests
- Calls
- Clicks
- Domain authority
- Subscribers
- Conversions
- Sales
- And honestly more…
It’s a LOT. So, what do you track and how often do you look?
Ultimately, the most important SEO analytics that I track frequently are…
- Keyword Rankings
- Organic Traffic
- Conversions/Sales
Two Types of SEO Analytics: Leading & Lagging
Leading analytics are things that, as the name suggests, lead to tangible business results such as sales.
Leading analytics are things like keyword rankings and organic traffic.
Keyword rankings and organic traffic are NOT the end-all-be-all. In 99.9% of cases, businesses don’t make money if they rank a keyword in position 1.
They make money because they ranked an important keyword in position one, which led to the user navigating to their website, which then led the user to take action and buy something.
Lagging analytics are things like conversions and sales.
Their success is frequently built on the performance of the leading analytics.
But it’s not guaranteed. Just because you rank first for a keyword doesn’t GUARANTEE that you’ll see an increase in sales.
Your landing page could have terrible conversion rate optimization (CTR) and so even though you rank 1st and users are coming to your website, they may not be converting.
Tracking Important SEO Analytics Can Be Tough Depending On Your Business Model
This is particularly true when it comes to lagging analytics like conversions and sales. Think about the following types of businesses and their SEO:
- Local physical therapy clinic SEO
- Ecommerce furniture store SEO
- National SaaS SEO
For physical therapists, the user might call and schedule an appointment after finding them on Google.
For ecommerce furniture stores, the user might initially find a company through Google and then ultimately buy based on Instagram remarketing ads.
For a national SaaS company, the user might hear about the company from a business mentor. They then might do a general Google search, recognize the brand name from their mentor, and then sign up.
However, tracking keyword rankings and organic traffic is pretty simple no matter the type of business.
Which Tool To Use For Each SEO Analytic
Keyword rankings: we use Agency Analytics & SEMrush. It looks like this:
Organic traffic: we use Google Search Console and Google Analytics
- But we build dashboards within Agency Analytics that connect the GSC and GA so we can view everything in one place
Conversions: we use Google Analytics, Hubspot, Shopify, etc (depends on the company)
- Again, we build dashboards within Agency Analytics that connect to either GA or Hubspot or Shopify so we can see conversion data directly within Agency Analytics
Since you’re on this page because you want to know how often to review SEO analytics, we’re going to assume that you already know how to track them.
So let’s move on to the important stuff.
How Often Should SEO Analytics Be Reviewed
The answer is… constantly. But you shouldn’t be looking at everything all the time.
SEO is a long-term game.
There are seasons of plateaus. There are seasons of j-curve growth. There are seasons of lower performance.
Below shows organic traffic for a physical therapist we’ve partnered with for nearly 3 years.
The goal with SEO? Long term growth over time.
With the brand above, we helped them go from 500 organic visitors per month to over 40,000 per month within 2.5 years.
Is it perfect growth month-over-month? Nope. But it’s definitely incredible, consistent long-term growth.
The point? If we only looked at weekly or monthly data in the middle of their campaign during a plateau or a period of negative traffic performance, we all might’ve freaked out. “Oh my gosh things are trending down and we’re all going to die!”
We look at the SAME analytics on a weekly and monthly basis.
Weekly
We look at keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.
We’re looking at these to ensure there aren’t any crazy fluctuations to see if the site incurs any penalties or issues. It allows us to catch potential big issues early on.
For example, if a keyword goes from position 2 to position 87 in one week, we need to get our hands dirty and dig in as to why.
However, ultimately, if a keyword goes from position 2 to position 4, we aren’t too worried and will simply keep an eye on it.
Monthly (with MoM and YoY lens)
We look at keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.
However, when we look monthly (we do this exercise a couple of days into each new month), we’re looking at all of the important SEO analytics with 2 lenses:
- Month-over-month comparison: How were keyword rankings, traffic, and sales compared to last month? We can easily see this through Agency Analytics by clicking “compare to last period”
MoM data doesn’t always tell the full story… For example, here’s our website’s organic traffic data for Dec 2022 compared to Nov 2022 – it’s down 2%.
However, we know that most people looking for SEO services are offline the last ~2 weeks of December, taking time off for the holidays.
- Year-over-year comparison: Seasonality is common with 90% of brands.
Many of our clients are based in Portland, OR where, in the winter months, it rains 5 days out of the week.
Or with ecommerce brands, sales frequently should be higher closer to the holidays. Again, we can easily see this with Agency Analytics:
Let’s go back to our website’s organic traffic for December 2022. Compared to the previous month, it was down 2%.
But, if we look at December 2022 compared to December 2021 (YoY), we can see that traffic is up 63% YoY.
Dec 2022: 2,894 organic visitors
Dec 2021: 1,773 organic visitors
That’s the long-term growth we care about! If we can increase traffic 63% YoY EVERY year, then in 2025 our December traffic will be 12,533 organic visitors.
We’ll take that.
Quarterly
We look at keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions + some more.
At the quarterly level, we’re also looking at things like:
- Domain authority
- SERP CTR
- And technical SEO stuff:
- Website load speed
- Technical audit for 404 errors, broken external links, etc
Domain authority:
If domain authority increases, that lets us know that the site can now rank for more competitive keywords. If it increases by a lot, we may change our content roadmap to target more competitive, higher-value keywords.
SERP CTR:
For all the keywords ranking in the top 3 positions, what does the CTR look like? Maybe there’s a handful of keywords ranking in position 3 that only have a CTR of 4-5%. If a keyword is ranking in position 3, the CTR should be much higher than that.
To increase CTR, we’ll re-write title tags and metas for important pages.
Technical SEO:
This one is pretty straightforward. We want to catch any technical errors and fix them on a quarterly basis.
Yearly
We look at EVERYTHING!
You want to know how often you should be reviewing SEO analytics. The end of the year is a great time to do a full-blown review of all SEO analytics.
Need Help Reviewing Your SEO Analytics? Our Team Can Help.
Click on the “Free SEO Audit” button in the upper right corner of your screen and someone on our team (frequently myself, even though I’m the owner) will spend 2-3 hours digging into your analytics to share recommended improvements.
Joey Randazzo
Owner & CEO of Portland SEO Growth
