Campaigns: How to Decide What to Track?
-
Hi There!
I'm new to SEOMoz, but not completely new to SEO. A bit of background: 9 year old content site, medium traffic (low 7 figures unique visitors yearly) with about 85% coming from SE traffic. (It was 75% but Panda seems to have bumped that up.)
I've created this with zero keyword research. I just built a site that I would have liked to have found online. It's a weight loss/fitness website with tools, calculators and articles.
I'm going to be working harder on getting traffic from other sources, but I signed up here because I want to make sure I'm taking full advantage of my site when it comes to SEO.
Having said that, I'm at a loss as to what to do with a campaign. My site is huge, with thousands of pages and keywords. I started a campaign, threw in a few keywords and some competitors just to get started, but this seems so...directionless.
How do I figure out what I want to analyze?
Thanks!
Suzanne
-
Thanks, Cyrus!!
-
Hi Suzanne,
The way most SEOs work is to move from low-hanging fruit to more challenging opportunities.
1. For most new users of SEOmoz who run their first PRO campaign, this means addressing the site audit in your crawl report, starting with the errors first.
You said you have a large site with 1000s of pages, so it's likely the crawl found 100s or even 1000s of errors on your site. This can make it a little overwhelming to know where to start.
Take advantage of the Help Guides. Here's the guide for the Crawl Diagnostics Tab. Read this top to bottom. If you don't know what something means, this is an excellent time to start researching. If you are faced with an overwhelming number of errors, there are a couple things you can do to prioritize.
- Sort the URLs of the errors by Page Authority. This will help you address your most important pages first.
- Export your crawl results to CSV. Once they are in a spreadsheet form, start to look for patterns. Multiple errors are often caused by the same problem, so making a small fix can sometimes lead to big results.
2. Add more keywords to your campaign. You can get these from Google Analytics. This Help Guide will guide you. Read articles on Keyword Research and find out what keywords you would like to rank higher for. Start to devise a plan.
3. Have you connected a Google Analytics account? This is extremely helpful. Yep, the Help Guides assist with that, too.
4. Check your On-Page reports. These are generated for any keyword/URL ranking in the top 50. Again, can you spot any patterns? Any changes you can make across your site to improve the keyword relevance of your pages? Try improving a handful of pages that already rank well for high volume keywords and see what happens. Experiment.
5. Analyze your links. Use Open Site Explorer Top Pages tab to make sure links to your site aren't being lost to broken URLs. Find out where are your best links are coming from and figure out how to do more of that. Look at your incoming anchor text. Does it mirror the keywords you are ranking for?
(Really, this is a much of a learning process as anything. But each step takes you further)
Examine the links of your competitor. Where did those links come from, and can you earn those same links? Where are your competitors stronger than you? How can you catch up? The keyword difficulty tool is great for this too.
6. Install the MozBar, if you haven't already. Start surfing everywhere with it. Use the tools to analyze pages and figuring out why they rank where they rank.
7. Even though your site has been around for years, there may have been some things overlooked. So pretend it's brand new . Watch this video from Rand about launching a site.
8. When you get stuck, browse old blog post, search Google, or ask a question here. The web is full of SEOs willing to help.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
I've been doing that, too. I see a few things I can clean up -- but it's nice to see some A and B report cards.
I just feel like I'm missing the point -- or some specific goals. Or a plan.
Thanks for the welcome!
Suzanne
-
Hi Suzanne,
I feel the same way when I see the campaign view, it kind of just provides an overall view of how your site is crawled by SEOMoz, and how you stack up against the competition.
If you click on the "Research Tools" Tab on the Navigation Menu, you may find that this will help you start in the right direction. You can check to see if your pages are fully optimized for the keywords you want, how many backlinks you have coming in, whether or not you rank in the top 50 results for certain keywords, etc.
Let us know and welcome to SEOMoz!
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
-
Tracking PDF downloads from SERP clicks
For the longest time, our company policy has always been to put PDFs in a secure folder (hence they are not indexed and do not appear in search results). After evaluating this strategy, there has been clamor in recent months to allow Google to index our whitepapers. My question: Once PDFs start appearing in search results, what is the best way to start tracking clicks due to these "downloads"?
Reporting & Analytics | | marshdigitalmarketing0 -
How is this site being tracked in GA?
Hi, Bit of an unusual one this, so please bear with me. This site http://www.hayesandhurst.com/ is being tracked in Google Analytics but we're unsure as to how. To the best of our knowledge we haven't inserted the tracking ID into the theme options or the tracking code into the source - and yet it appears to be tracking successfully! I did send some instructions to the client to set up the Analytics account in their name - I fear they have added the code somewhere to the site, but we cannot see where! Perhaps via Google tag Manager?? As I say, an odd one this, but if anyone can shed any light on this mystery i'd be hugely grateful. The tracking ID is UA-64505394-1 for the record. Regards,
Reporting & Analytics | | nathangdavidson
Nathan0 -
Click to call tracking
I'm looking to add a click to call button, when a user lands on our quote page from a mobile phone. I'm wondering the best way of goal tracking? Our current method of tracking uses Events. I was wondering if this was a sensible way forward for this. The dev team are suggesting it may be a problem as it refreshes the page... I'm not a dev, so I don't fully understand it all! Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Universal Analytics Ecommerce Tracking in Magento
We have a problem similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22229312/universal-analytics-could-not-track-transaction-in-magento On a client's website. I need an absolute knock-out EXPERT at solving this to give us a quote on doing something like this. It's very urgent but it is paid. Basically the site used the old tracking code, worked, then client said they wanted new data so we upgraded to Universal. Now everything works but Ecommerce tracking. Desperately need help! Thanks all!
Reporting & Analytics | | MattAntonino0 -
Domain redirect for direct mail (source) tracking in Analytics?
We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Google Analytics subdomain ecommerce tracking flatlines :-(
Buongiorno from 19 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 This website http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ contains a shop sub domian @ http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/. I configured the site Ga analytics code to include the subdomain (see below code). I had to do this as i was getting refferal data from the actuall subdomain. But after following the instructions on p117 of cutroni's ga book things have gone wrong, mainly now eCommerce data has dissapeared 😞 So my question is please: "Why has installing the GA code above caused eCommerce tracking to suddenly go dead?" Grazie tanto,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
David0 -
Goal tracking in Google Analytics
Hi folks I read from various sources that if you setup goals in Google Analytics each of these goals can only be fulfilled once per visit. Also some sources suggesting that only one goal from each goal group can be fulfilled per visit. On our site we have a goal for external links since this provides value to partners. Some users do open an external link in a new tab, then come back to the main site. Any further goal completions would then not get tracked. Since we apply a result based payment model for our work this means we are literally loosing money. Anyone has official info from Google on this? Can it be configured? How long is a visit? Thanks a million and have a great day. Fredrik
Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify0 -
Google Analtyics Cross Domain Tracking - in a form
I have a 3rd party booking engine that is causing my own domain to show up as a top referreral in google analytics. The vendor is on my very last nerve 🙂 So they're not helping. Would anyone be interested in helping a newbie out with a frustrating problem? Code: Reservations Page - function SubmitReservationForm() {. . . .
Reporting & Analytics | | jenny05
ResLink = "http://www.bookingengine.com/res/vn4/checka.aspx?month=" + Month + "&day=" + Day + "&year=" + Year + "&nights=" + Nights + "&rooms=" + Rooms + "&adults=" + Adults + "&children=" + Children + "&B1=Check+Availability&hotelid=xxxx"
pageTracker._link(ResLink);
return true;
} On Every page: Any thoughts would be appreciated! I believe the problem is pageTracker._link(ResLink); but I'm clueless on fixing it.1