I chose to write this article as a reference to help you monitor and track the website performance so it\u2019s as optimal as possible. Keeping a close eye on these items will help you keep track of your website\u2019s authority on the internet and alert you to problems readily.<\/p>\n
Google Webmasters Tools<\/h2>\n
If you\u2019re managing any kind of a website in relation to marketing, you probably already know about Google Webmasters Tools function and toolset. It\u2019s a tool that gives you very good insight on your site\u2019s health from Google\u2019s perspective. On top of being a monitoring tool, it allows you to help Google index, crawl and categorize your website properly in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), while also giving you the flexibility and control over features to improve the sites performance and usability. We\u2019ll go over various important sections of Webmaster Tools that should be verified daily, or as often as possible.<\/p>\n
The Crawl Section<\/h3>\n
This section allows you to examine how Google examines your site and what it finds in your site. You can observe Google\u2019s behavior towards your site. In the crawl section, you will find a sub-section called crawl errors. Google will list all errors that occurred during a crawl. It will give you a list of 4XX and 5XX errors<\/a> as well as \u201cnot followed\u201d and \u201caccess denied\u201d pages. This data list is segmented in three tabs: Web, Smartphones and Feature Phones. You want this section to be always clean which signals to Google that you are a relevant and reliable site that produces quality content while as well sending signals that you are active on the site working to improve the usability and user experience. It will certainly help your domain\u2019s authority on the web, both in the Google search index and with end.<\/p>\n Pro tip<\/b>: when working on errors from your report and trying to solve it, you can always fetch the page\u2019s URL that you\u2019re trying to fix with Google\u2019s \u00a0\u201cfetch as googlebot\u201d tool<\/a>. It will help define whether the error still exists on the desired page or if it has been corrected.<\/p>\n Another good thing to look into when monitoring a site\u2019s health is its \u201cincoming links\u201d profile through Google\u2019s eyes. It is well known in the search industry that your domain authority is directly related to your link profile.\u00a0 Plenty of tools already exist to list all links that point to your domain but it is good to have an idea of what Google is discovering about your link profile. You don\u2019t want to be identified by Google as being part of a \u201cbad linking neighbourhood\u201d as you can be affected by these areas in a negative way, and be considered by Google as a \u201clow quality site\u201d in some extreme situations. I monitor and verify this report section daily. In verifying the link profile, it\u2019s also good practice in that you might identify new links to your profile that could help you gain authority.<\/p>\n Pro Tip: <\/b>It\u2019s not always easy to contact a webmaster and have a link removed from a site, especially if you start to see many incoming links that could affect you negatively. Some websites, owners and manager don\u2019t even have contact information to reach the owner or manager. Therefore, what Google recommends is to try to get in touch with the webmasters to submit a request for the link removal. You have to keep track of what you do to try and ask for the link to be removed for the faulty site. As a last resort, if you weren\u2019t able to reach a point of contact, you can use Google\u2019s \u201cdisavow tool\u201d to request a removal.<\/a> Make sure to keep a track of, including emails, form submissions, or even phone calls and messages. Each documented step taken on your part in order to contact the webmasters, to removal negatively impacting links from your profile. By having all this information (if you receive a site penalty for bad links) you could possibly reverse Google\u2019s decision should they impose a by getting in touch with the appropriate team and presenting them your documentation and let them know the steps you took to improve your link profile through established contact. The advanced feature called disavow tools should only be used in last resort<\/b> and with precaution<\/b>. Here\u2019s the support documentation about it the feature if you want to use the tool. I suggest you to read it<\/a> to familiarize yourself with it and the policy in which it can be used.<\/p>\n This Index Status section of Webmaster Tools gives you advanced details of what has been crawled and indexed on your site and what\u2019s where problems may lie. You can control the indexing of the domain by implementing both sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, but more important is that this tool gives you a deep insight into your site\u2019s indexing status. It also lists pages (or URL\u2019s) that are currently blocked by the robots.txt file, so you can manage the site with more ease.<\/p>\n This section should never be neglected and watched very carefully. Google will communicate directly with you through this feature should a problem arise, and in advise you in case of emergency and important information that you should know about regarding your site\u2019s health and index status. \u00a0Among others, you might receive messages if they think your site may have been hacked or had a spam injection OR, in worst case scenario, if Google detected unnatural links pointing to your site (penalty warning!!!). Google may also think that links pointing to your site are being built using techniques outside Google\u2019s Webmaster Guidelines<\/a>, which will flag their system. Advise: you will want to look over and read this guidelines section very carefully in order to be fully responsive when a critical issue is detected.<\/p>\n I use Google Analytics every day to deduct several observations. It is always good to stay close to your audience, know them better so you can provide a better website and user experience. It gives you a better idea of how to orient your site, and to satisfy their needs and delight them with information they are looking for. One example of an observation you could leverage from this would be a high bounce rate<\/a>. If this specific value has increased a lot, you could pinpoint which change you did recently that caused the users to go away. The data in Google\u2019s analytics platform is worth\u2019s its weight in gold!<\/p>\n Another good example of what to look for in Analytics are the pages of your website that perform the most. Knowing which one has a better conversion rate or the higher average time on site (depending on your goals), you can know which one to push more. This advice also works the other way: knowing which pages perform the less in order to optimize them.<\/p>\n You can look at the pages that are slower than average. If you did a recent change, you can know what the impact on your site speed is and try to optimize it to improve the end user experience as well as the sites overall performance score. It is important to consider site speed and its part in the ranking factors of Google search index. Having a very slow site can lower your overall authority, thus resulting in a poor user experience and more often than not, search ranking and SERP index issues.<\/p>\n This check will take roughly 5 minutes of your time and will give you an insight of your site\u2019s \u201cvalue\u201d overall from the eyes of the search giant. If your authority drops severely, you may want to look into what you\u2019ve done in the past few weeks or months that might have affected your Domain Authority (Da) or your PageRank (Pr)<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pro Tip: <\/b>Note that the Domain Authority is an approximation. If it drops, it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that you\u2019ve done something wrong. Good advice would be to look at the authority of your competitor\u2019s sites and see if they dropped as well. If it\u2019s the case, it might be because of a ranking or an algorithm adjustment by Google, and it will be up to you or your strategy to modify to increase performance of the article. <\/b><\/p>\n You should check daily for algorithm updates<\/a> as you might need to adjust your marketing strategy in some cases. Google rarely publishes alerts when algorithm shifts take place, but our industry watch these events very closely looking for signals. By using the Barracuda tool above, and connecting your analytics account, you can see where Google may have made improvements to its algorithm which will help you identify by correlation a problem with your data and traffic analysis.<\/p>\n Pro Tip: <\/b>If we take the Google Hummingbird\u2019s update<\/a> as an example, you might want to enhance your site for long tail keywords and try to meet the searchers need by implementing an intention marker in your blog posts.<\/p>\n For this step, I look at and track unusual gains or losses of inbound links to a website. If my links drops, I will try to determine which links have been lost and research the issue to understand why it may have happened. On the other side of things, if my links increased a lot, I will want to check in and verify to see what is the cause of this increase is and make sure that the inbound links aren\u2019t \u201cspammy\u201d and that they are legit (in order not to be hit with an unnatural link penalty), keeping in lines with Google Webmaster Guidelines mentioned above.<\/p>\n I look into competitor\u2019s online marketing and content strategy often. It will give you a good idea of what they\u2019re doing, working on and what you should do to get ahead of them. You want to know what they\u2019re doing to distinguish yourself from them.<\/p>\n Pro Tip: <\/b>I look often in their link profile and see which ones I could acquire. In order for the check to be faster, you can look into the fresh links in order not to look into the whole list.<\/p>\n You probably already know that keywords are becoming \u201cnot provided\u201d on Google\u2019s network. Bing is in fact researching and beginning to implement this SSL type search function as well which will lead to even more keyword \u201cnot provided\u201d data. Even though it\u2019s not as important in 2013, I strongly suggest that you take the time to look into your main keyword rankings as often as possible to identify whether what you\u2019re doing is beneficial or not. It can also be an early signal if your ranking drops for more than 50 positions (unnatural link detection, duplicate content, alerts, etc.). You can use tools such as Search Engine Scout<\/a> or Moz Keyword Ranking<\/a> to automatically gather and monitor your keyword\u2019s position. You can also do it manually by running a search on your respective Google\u2019s domain (Google.ca in Canada and Google.com in USA ).<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/b> Once the query is run, you will need to add the tag \u201c&pws=0\u201d to ignore your Google profile\u2019s history and preferences. This will remove any customization in your keyword search based on your past search history. You may also need to add an \u201chl=fr\u201d for French keywords and \u201chl=en\u201d for English ones for the result to be as accurate as possible.<\/p>\nIncoming links<\/h3>\n
Index status<\/h3>\n
Google\u2019s Webmaster Tools Messaging System<\/h3>\n
Analytics\u00a0:<\/h2>\n
Observation<\/h3>\n
Pages Insight<\/h3>\n
Site Speed<\/h3>\n
PageRank or Domain Authority (OpenSiteExplorer<\/a>)<\/h2>\n
Algorithm updates<\/h2>\n
Inbound Links<\/h2>\n
Monitor your Competitors<\/h2>\n
Keyword Ranking<\/h2>\n
Having a Campaign Automation Monitor like Moz<\/h2>\n
![\"Moz](\"http:\/\/ludismedia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Moz-Campaign.png\")
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