Is there a way to map your on-page SEO changes with the organic growth?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I was just wondering if there's a way we can map our on-page SEO changes with the increase/decrease in organic traffic. For instance, I introduced brand pages' link the product page breadcrumbs and suddenly organic traffic for my brand pages increase from X to 2X in 1 couple of weeks. Now, this can be because of this breadcrumb change purely or because of some algorithm update or may be, bots started finding the content interesting and hence, started ranking them up (in case the brand pages were launched recently).
So, you can't say which change should be mapped to what increase/decrease in organic traffic. Or, is there a way to map this?
-
Thank you so much Sir Alan. Really appreciate your reply
-
I'm only going to add to all of these great responses by saying this:
1. Even if you make a change today, it does NOT mean you will be able to know EXACTLY when that change is acknowledged by Google. This is especially true on larger sites. It can take days, weeks, even months for Google to properly recrawl the entire site (even when they crawl every day, some of those URIs were just crawled the day before or three days ago, while only a portion of today's crawl will be other, not as recently crawled URIs). And then it can take weeks for all of Google's algorithms to catch up. Along the way, those algorithms may even evaluate only a PARTIAL understanding of the change (while waiting for Googlebot to get to all the other pages).
2. One additional suggestion is to look at in-page analytics within Google Analytics, or a 3rd party click tracking tool to get a better idea of whether people are even clicking on a given link on-page. Just be careful in setting up 3rd party click tracking - do it poorly, and you can cause massive duplicate URL problems. And in-page analytics in GA often aggregates all clicks on all of the individual links on a single page where several point to one common destination URI.
-
Oh wow! Will connect with you on Twitter to understand about the same which can help me plan it better. Hope you won't mind sharing the way your architected your internal tracking tool
-
Yeah I am an Analytic Junkie and I have incorporated my own analytics I built that helps me compare with GA at the same time that helps me dive deeper into the numbers and gives me a more detailed overview of behavior on my pages as well as users.
It's cool
-
Hi Linda,
Yeah! High time to start exploring GA annotations. Needless to say, will definitely post here once I'll be able to find/build a good solution for the same
-
Hi Cesar Bielich,
Thank you so much for the well descriptive explanation, will start exploring GA annotations right away.
Yes, I can code and planning to work on internal analytics system to track these granular pieces but it'll take time to implement such powerful system when you've 10 million + pages and hence, its not a P0 right now. We have integrated GTM as well, and tracking some of these values to some extent. But, as you correctly mentioned that none of these things can be directly mapped to any increase/decrease in organic traffic, I should definitely think about prioritizing my project to understand the correlation between my changes and the organic traffic which can be an awesome asset to understand these things.
-
Hi Nitin,
We found that using Fruition (actually a penalty checker) was pretty useful as well. It overlays all Google updates and SERP changes on your Analytics data. And of course: use annotations in Analytics.
If you figure out a great way to do this, please let me know!
Kind regards,
Linda Hogenes
-
Hello Nitin,
Honestly I think there is no one solution fit for all in this situation. Let’s say you tweak your home page title and rankings get up by 2 positions this never means that this is a standard solution and things might not work the same way for other website.
Even if you test one thing at a time to see how your changes are impacting results, you cannot control the environment completely. Let’s say you fix all 404s on your website and panda roll out on similar dates so you cannot exactly say that if this change in result is because of fixing 404 pages or because of the panda update.
I think it’s very difficult to say exactly what is impacting how much on results but you can do some test and come to a point that few factors has a less weight as compare to others within the industry.
Just a thought!
-
Well there are a few factors you have to consider with this and unfortunately there is no definitive way to determine this with Google, but with patience, over time you can see the benefits from your changes and track them.
When it comes to algorithmic changes there is practically no way to monitor that. Google has told us time and time again that they make many changes constantly (almost daily and up to 500 to 600 changes a year) to their algorithm to make it smarter so you have to consider that. Tracking changes to on-page SEO with specific algorithmic changes will pretty much be impossible, BUT it's not impossible if you track it correctly. Remember that your users will give you all the information you need to determine if your changes are working, and the more your users are happy the more they will share and spread the news so that will eventually evolve into shares and backlinks.
Tracking on-page SEO changes to organic traffic
This one is simpler than you think as long as you know how to do it correctly. One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics. Here are a few things you can do.
- Google Analytics provides annotations for you to create markers when you make changes on your site. You can then track the changes you made with the annotation and see the difference in traffic.
- Track changes with "compare to" option when selecting dates that help you see the differences in traffic from the previous period. For instance if you made a change on November 1st. Use the compare tool and track the previous week of traffic to that date range and see if you can see an increase in organic traffic.
- You can "compare to" in the same way with more specific setting and see which pages on your site (or ones you made changes to) increased or decreased after you made your changes. Just run the "compare to" scenario the same in Google Analytics, but do it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and see which pages increased in traffic from your on-page changes.
When making these changes remember to use Google Analytics and track specific organic changes in traffic by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium and then click on your search engine of choice (I'm assuming Google of course). Or when tracking other changes use different dimensions and metrics to track the organic traffic.
Can you code?
Depending if you are using wordpress or built your site from scratch knowing how to include some code on your site to track your changes helps tremendously.
For instance you can add some code to help you determine how many users are clicking on your breadcrumbs links and see if that help creates more organic traffic. PHP is great for this. Instead of having the links on your breadcrumbs sending the user to the exact page, have it go to a script that logs that click in a database so that you can see how many users are clicking on your breadcrumbs links and which ones, then send them to the desired page. Over a few weeks you will see which clicks are the most effective.
If you need some help you can private message me here at Moz and I can show you what I mean. I have been a web developer for over 15 years and I am a Analytic junkie so I can show you some things
Hope that helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Shall i index double pages of my website as compared to my competitors?
a:my competitors has indexed 10 pages (checked it with site:abcd.com and found 10 results) b:what if i index 20 pages of my site and create a lot of content which is also better than my competitors who will have the edge?
Reporting & Analytics | | calvinkj0 -
High Temporary Redirects: Login required pages
Noticed something interesting, a high temporary redirect report from Moz. Reviewing the pages they are caused by the user having to login and getting redirected. I can see the returnto query in the URL too. My thoughts: Since a login is required and the user is being redirected, these should remain 302 and not 301. I tested my Google Analytics account to **Exclude URL Query Parameter **returnto, just to see if it affected traffic. It didn't, I mean I don't see urls duplicated with the parameter anymore, just grouped together, so traffic is still being counted. I'm going to wait 1 more day and see what impact the GA traffic is before applying the exclusion to my true Google Analytics profile. This got me thinking, I should probably exclude this parameter from Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, that way Google/bing won't read those urls. Now does Moz's crawler follow that? Do you think that would change my moz crawl diagnostic report because I told Google/Bing crawlers to exclude that parameter. What do you think of my approach to reduce these high temporary redirects reported by Moz? Will it work? Has it plagued you?
Reporting & Analytics | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Google Analytics is treating my blog like all the content is just on the home page.
Hello all, I installed Google Analytics on a main website and a blog (blog.travelexinsurance.com) While it appears to be tracking correctly (and when I test it in real time it shows that I'm visiting) but it is treating the entire blog as though it's one page. So I can't see data on blog post X. All I see is that X visitors came to my blog in aggregate. So I see blog.travelex.com has 999 visitors, but it doesn't show that /travel-luggage got 50 visits, while /insurace-tips got 75 and so forth. I assume I screwed up the tracking somehow, but can't figure out where I went wrong. Tracking on the main domain works just fine. It's specific to the blog.
Reporting & Analytics | | Patrick_G0 -
Google Analytics: Okay to change domain?
So, we are a long time user of GA and we're planning a domain change.
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0823
Does anyone know if I can 'change the domain' in GA so we don't lose our past data?
Thanks!0 -
Relation between Page and Landing Page
Hi all, I am looking through the Analytics data on a specific 'page' (404.html which is the Not found page) and as my secondary dimensions, I have Landing Page data. Now am I not sure how the page and the landing page are related here. Is it basically saying 58 Page views of the 404.html were originated by the users who landed on brochures.html? If someone could provide any pointers on it, it would be great. Thank you for your time. uZQJ
Reporting & Analytics | | nirpan0 -
Page Retirement
I have a site with 6000 indexed urls. 1,500 have traffic I feel is valuable and 4,500 with almost no traffic (perhaps less than 10 page views in a year). These 4500 are inedxed but have 1 or less in bound links. If I retire the pages, will I help or hurt my Domain Authority and separately my rankings that could produce traffic? I'd appreciate any consideration. Jeffrey Strassman www.consultant360.com
Reporting & Analytics | | biggieshaws0 -
Has Google changed its algorithm? My traffic has almost doubled and I don't know why.
My traffic has nearly doubled over the past few days, and my conversion rate has doubled as well. It looks like our rankings haven't changed... We haven't done anything to the site recently, although we did submit a couple of press releases through the wire not too long ago (within the last few weeks). I do not think that this is a cyclical/seasonal jump in traffic because last year this did not occur. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | deuce1s0 -
If a page bounces in the woods, can Google Panda hear it?
I have read that after the Panda update a site's bounce rate is an important ranking metric. However, can anyone confirm whether all pages count equally? For instance, my home page gets 5000% more traffic than Deep Page X. If Deep Page X has a poor bounce rate, does it matter as much as if my Homepage has a bad bounce rate? I am guessing not, but wanted to open it up for discussion. If not, it has me wondering on what to do for some of my database driven content. I have some dynamically created pages that have higher bounce rates and minimal unique content. They aren't pure spam or junk, but are likely only about 1% unique from one another. Sounds like a no brainer change post-Panda, right? Well, what if I was the only one targeting the keywords for these pages? The pages pull from info I stored on the U.S. government stimulus program (related to my industry). It then has just about every city, state and county combo in the country for my product. For instance, a page <title>might be "Flemington, NJ Widgets - Somerset County". Something that no one else is targeting and drives minimal traffic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do I take this content down? I didn't have any affects, positive or negative from Panda, so I am hesitant to take down thousands of Google cached pages.</p></title>
Reporting & Analytics | | TheDude0