Tracking SEO progress for clients or a boss can be a Heculean task. Depending on the number of metrics you care about, the time spent data gathering can be overwhelming.
I like to simplify things and track just a few key metrics depending on what type of progress I’m tracking.
For most of these I look at the change monthly in the metric to track progress over time. Some metrics are best analyzed weekly or even daily.
Choose the time frame that works best for you. Often in-house SEOs report weekly, while agencies trend towards monthly updates. Competitive SEOs might compare some of these metrics daily (rankings for example).
I look at three levels of the site: Sitewide Level. Page Level. Keywords Level. Each level is kind of like looking at high-level overview (sitewide), mid-level (page), or low (keyword) view into how your SEO is going.
Site Level SEO Metrics
Non-brand organic traffic
Goals (conversions sitewide)
Domain Authority (seomoz metric)
Unique Websites Linking (seomoz metric)
Number of keywords with visits
(not provided) site average
Page Level SEO Metrics
Non-brand organic traffic
Goals (this URL only)
Number of keywords with visits to URL
Page Authority
Unique Websites Linking
Social Signals (Google+1′s, Likes/Shares, Tweets)
Keyword Level SEO Metrics
Keyword referral traffic by search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
Goals
Position in Google/Bing
We don’t track all of these metrics automatically in SERPs, but we’re certainly working on these to make it as easy as possible to track real SEO progress.
