SEO - How to monitor your results

In the SEO industry, openness and clarity of results are a must.  This industry went through a stage of being hounded by cowboys, who felt that because it takes time for SEO changes to be noticed they could get away with talking the talk but not walking the walk.

I do still, from time to time, get a phone call; it normally starts along the lines of “Our boss is a pure mathematician and he has broken Google’s algorithm” , or “We can guarantee you position 1 results for any of your keywords”. I have taken a couple of these callers to the cleaners, but it is just not worth the effort anymore. 

It does annoy me that these “fly by night” SEO companies are tainting our profession, but on a positive note there does seem to be a marked improvement in the levels of SEO work being done in this country.

So this leads me on to the question; How can you prove your SEO worth and not be regarded as one of these Fly by Night agencies?  Well the long and the short of it is, as SEOs we are here to improve a company’s profitability.  As SEOs we do this by improving the visibility for specific keywords obviously…

So if this was a sales site, we create more sales from non-paid sources, what ever the KPI of the site our job is to improve the quality and the quantity of the sites defined KPIs.

Now, there are three ways in which we can prove our worth.

1. Data Analysis

A good SEO, as well as having a front end developers mind, a business development mangers heart and a marketing managers smile, should also be a closet Excel fan..  If you don’t see life in grey boxes and the processing of large batches of databases, SEO might not be for you. 

For those that do, our data analysis skills transfer very easily into web analysis, so as well as seeing what is working we can very easily add value to our services by making on site recommendations  by processing what is not.

From my experience the insight that good SEOs and data analysts give are worth their weight in gold.

2. Picking Profitable SEO Keywords (Picking Your Battles)
The foundations of a good SEO campaign are ensuring that the keywords that are to be optimised from are the most profitable ones for your (or your clients) organisation.  This is a skill in itself and I will discuss on a  blog post another day.

3. Improving The Positions Of Keywords Selected (Fighting Your Battles)

When any on site SEO work is done, there should be a general uplift in non-paid search traffic as the site may become listed for more long tail keywords as by-products of this work. This long tail uplift is important and normally can be reported using the Ecommerce section from your analytics report.
The best way to prove that your changes are having a positive effect on your (or your clients) website is to monitor site performance at a keyword level.

For the last 12 months I have been using a piece of software created by Caphyon call Advanced Web Ranking, now in version 8.1.

After trying a vast number of these seo tools, this one is time after time the most accurate. The tool works well, and only when being silly with it did we start getting warning messages and capture requests from major search engines. (We were trying to do something silly - amazing but still silly).

The main features that I regularly use are:

•           Random user agent strings increase update times
•           Can use the Google AJAX API if needed
•           Local search reporting
•           Proxy per project feature allows for requests from different IP addresses. Great for seeing your results on .com in America say.

There are various levels of software available from a basic $99 package to a full server packages so it is affordable too.

Monitoring changes in positions based on your parameters is really easy when displayed graphically:

If you can relate an increase in position of your profitable keywords and normalising your year on year data against seasonality, you should be able to derive a direct increase in site profitability from the work you are doing for your client.

Now that you have absolute visibility on your SEO results all you need to ensure is that you deliver results.  But you are reading this blog so I am sure you will ;-)

Now there is a second tool that is worth considering if you are an SEO, and you are involved in link building, again by Caphyon and is called Advanced Link Manager.  This SEO software allows you to monitor your client or your own link building activities.

Ok, this information can be found in both Google and Bing webmaster tool, the old Yahoo tool is also good but will be phased out soon, but the big bonus of the Advance Link manager tool is the ability to chart changes over time.


It is really important that if you are link building for your clients you are completely open about how you are going it, the sort of links that you are getting and what you are doing to ensure that the sites you are link building for don't get penalised.

The other great reason why you should use a piece of link building software to monitor links is should your site to suffer a penalty, if you employ this reporting format you can very easily look back over your resent activities and identify the bad links.

What can be charted:

• Number of links over time
•  Locations of links
• Page rank of links

This sort of report can be generated for your site or for your competitors. The first part of any link building is snipping good links of your competitors running reports in this tool helps you to identify the low hanging fruit of links to your competitors site.

This is a really great tool and it is definitely worth trying both .  They are both available for a month’s free trial.




Written by Martin McAndrew
Twitter: @MartinMcAndrew