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
-
Is It Possible to have Cross Domain Tracking on Two Different Accounts?
Good afternoon to all, I have this kind of dilemma regarding setting up tracking code on two different accounts, namely bioglass.com with GA Code UA-12345678-1 where all the product information has been listed and shopbioglass.com with GA Code UA-87654321-1 where the prices are located and transaction takes place. Both of them are connected since if you click the buy button on bioglass.com for a specific product, it will automatically redirect to shopbioglass.com where the prices and transactions comes into place. Dilemma: I want to check how many conversion took place from bioglass.com to shopbioglass.com. I know they have different GA Code but is it possible for me to have a cross domain tracking for this?? What are the possible remedies if not? Thanks to all 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | TWSOM0 -
Set Up of Goal Tracking with Google Analytics-$750 a Fair Price????
Greetings Moz Community! My firm operates commercial real estate website that contains 3-4 forms. Each form represents a goals. Google Analytics has been set up for years, but it does not track these form completions/goals properly. My SEO firm has offered to configure Goals on Google Analytics for $750. Is this a fair price? If the set up takes one hour, I am really over paying. But if this is a complex project that may take 7-9 hours the pricing seems OK. Also, the SEO firm will require an additional $750 in the future to set up event tracking. Is this excessive? I might add that my developer will need to add code to my web site. My SEO company has proven reliable and accurate. I can go to sleep at night knowing they are doing a good job. Where as my Argentinian developers really try their best, but perhaps because of the language barrier, they can make mistakes from time to time. I am willing to pay a premium to ensure that the job is done correctly domestically, however I don't appreciate over paying. Is the $750 payment for setting up Google Analytics reasonable assuming the job is done well??? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Track social shares of my webpage
Hello ! I've just implemented new images on my website and I would like to know what is the best tool to track them on social media (how many are tweeted, shared on facebook, etc.). The best would be a tool telling me that this photo was shared X times on faebook, Y times on twitter, etc; What is the best tools for you ? Tks a lot !
Reporting & Analytics | | AymanH1 -
How to hook up a ppc campaign to a google + Page
Greetings,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Sometimes you just want to give Google a big slap for making straight forward requests damn impossible. So all i ma trying to ad is point a ppc ad at this Google + account <a>https://plus.google.com/118393512656496298734#118393512656496298734/posts</a> But i get a warning sign saying:
"The URL must be for a Google+ page, not a personal profile" I then spend half an hour tring to find a Google + page but get no where fast 😞 Warning message illustrated here:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/google-page-plus_zps46ff995a.jpg So my question is please how to a get the Google + page for this account:
<a>https://plus.google.com/118393512656496298734#118393512656496298734/posts</a> Any insights welcome!
David0 -
How to not track mobile redirects in Google Analytics
If a user is on a mobile device and comes to our home page, http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/Home/ they are redirected to http://m.darden.virginia.edu/web/Home/. We want a way to remove all the redirects from our Google analytics reports. More specifically we do not want to include the the page view of http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/Home/ in our page view count when the user is on a mobile device. How do we do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Ga event tracking and GAC code placement
Just relaunched website and since then specific event tracking has zeroed. I copied event tracking directly from old site so it should work. Overall analytics are fine. Only variable I can think of is where google analytics code is placed. Does GAC code need to be on HTML header or at end of body specifically for event tracking to work? Example: Steripen.com/freedom/... When user clicks "REI" icon, this tracks an event that a user clicked on one of our"retailer links." Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | Timmmmy0 -
When I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
when I look at my SEOMOZ campaigns I see there are a lot of warnings in regards to missing Meta Tags Descriptions but they exist on a clien'ts wordpress site
Reporting & Analytics | | Doug_Hay1 -
How to track what people type on my text boxes on Google Analytics?
Hi there! In our website, we have a few text boxes that users need to use to complete the goal. The boxes aren't search boxes, but it's still important to us to track what people type on it. I'm looking for a way to track the data through the "event" feature in Google Analytics, but it seems that this tracker can only calculate clicks, or video views etc. Does anyone knows how to track do it?
Reporting & Analytics | | ivan.precisodisso0