Ultimately, one thing you'll want to make sure
you're tracking is how your regionalized pages are being discovered by search
engines and displayed for the keywords on your list. At the end of the day,
this comes down to rank checking. But you'll also find that regularly
monitoring your site will help not just with knowing where you rank for
keywords in which countries and search engines, but it will also show you how
competitive your site is, how successful it is in driving the right kind of
organic search traffic, and constantly identifying areas where you can make
some improvements.
Since we're talking about rank checking, it's
important to understand that search engines have come a long way in
personalizing results. In the old days of SEO, there was one search engine that
returned the same results to everyone, keyword by keyword. But these days
because of all the differences that can show up depending on where you are and
who you are, keyword rankings themselves have been made less clear and,
frankly, a little less important than they once were. That is to say, we need
more than just a rank number to evaluate and monitor progress these days.
We want a more holistic measure of search
visibility. You'll want to keep this in mind if you use keyword ranking as a
success indicator. That said, there are many tools for tracking or monitoring
search visibility. Some of our favorites are the ones we've already looked at
in this course, like Webmaster Tools from Google, Moz, Google Analytics, and
SEMrush. We've seen briefly that in Google Webmaster Tools you can use search
query reports to view how many impressions your keywords generate in search
results pages on Google, and you can track clickthroughs and average ranking
positions.
You can also drill down to discover which
pages on your site are displayed for the search query and on what page. On this
report you can identify pages that are performing well and those that can could
use a little improvement. For example, let's drill into a search term that
should have a very high clickthrough rate, the actual name of my company. Here
I can see that the vast majority of clicks to my site on this keyword went to
my home page, which is probably very appropriate. Remember how we said
different people will see different rankings for the same exact keyword?
Scrolling down you can see a bit of a histogram view of the positions my pages
appeared in.
Again, in this case, we've done a pretty good
job of ranking for our own name globally, which is hopefully not that much of a
challenge. But let's go back and apply a geographic filter. This time let's
take a look at how we're doing in the UK. We do a lot of analytics consulting
work, so it's not surprising to see people finding us on queries that have to
do with things like Google Analytics and Site Catalyst, which was the previous
name of Adobe Analytics that's still widely used. So let's focus on these two
rows here where the only difference is that one version has been compressed
into one word.
Combined, that's actually a fair amount of
search impressions comparatively, and we see low clickthrough rates and not the
best average positions. Drilling down into this first variation, we can see
that's there's really just one page driving this search result, and it's
hovering around that 4 and 5 spot in the UK. This means while we're getting
traction in the UK, we may want to give this page a bit of a boost there. The
first step may be to create a UK-specific version of the page and outfit it
with all the hreflang or metadata that we can to tell the search engines we've
got a UK focus.
We might also choose to review it in more
detail for on-page technical SEO factors. We might point a few relevant
internal links at it. Or we might try to build some external links pointing to
it from local UK websites. Of course, once we've done that, we'll keep coming
back to this report to see what impact we're making. Don't forget to head over
to your analytics tools to make sure that this new UK Adobe Analytics traffic
that's hopefully coming to our site now is actually valuable traffic. Are they
converting on our business objectives? Generally getting in the habit of
viewing the search query and top pages reports regularly to track your keyword
visibility in the context of countries that you're targeting is a good idea.
As we've said before in this course, remember
to download this data every month or so since it's only kept for 90 days. You
can also take advantage of third-party paid tools to help you monitor keywords
over time. For example, to view ranking data for each of your international
sections, you can use tools like the Moz Campaigns feature. Now this lets you
enter a list of keywords to be tracked on specific geo-targeted search engines
over time. It will show you how all of those international keywords are
performing. Here I've clicked on the Engines tab, and you can see side-by-side
comparisons for the keywords we're targeting in Google's US and Canadian search
engines as well as the US version of Bing.
I can quickly see any changes over the
previous period. Having this data lets you trend these things over time. Beyond
rankings or search query visibility, you can also track the growth of your
external back links using Google Webmaster Tools or third-party tools, like
Moz's Open Site Explorer or within a Campaign. Using the Link Analysis tool
here on Moz, I can quickly scan my list of Inbound Links or Linking Domains for
telltale signs of a local focus. Back to our earlier example, if I'm really
focused on improving a page's search visibility in the UK, I can search for
domain extensions of .co.uk or UK subdomains or UK folders to get a quick and
dirty sense of how I'm doing in those endeavors.
Of course, this data can be downloaded and
then further manipulated and analyzed as well for more accuracy. Back in Google
Webmaster Tools, you can look at the links to your site report to get a glimpse
of the domains and pages that Google knows are linking to you. At the end of
the day, you want to make sure that you're monitoring the right things. If you
can't take action from a metric or a report, then chances are it's not worth
reporting on. If you're focused only on ranking number one for a term, you
might waste a lot of time and energy when the traffic that comes in on that
term isn't engaged or converting on your business goals.
So ultimately, improving your organic
channels' performance internationally is an ongoing process, and one that is
made easier by being aware of your holistic search visibility across the
countries and languages that you target, and recommending and taking specific
and appropriate actions.
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