Re-Launching Old website with New SEO Friendly Features - What should I track?

[rpaiva]

Hey Mozers,

I was brought on to the team to Optimize the old website to make it more SEO friendly and I was able to get some cool features up.

What Analytic Key points should I keep track of? The website launches in 2 weeks and I think Now would be a great time to start gather data bout the old site.  I'd like to make sure I keep the website under a microscope to make sure there are as little errors as possible.

What am I missing I already have:

Page Authority

Domain Authority

Bounce Rate

Time on page

Visitors/Sessions

Unique Visitors/Sessions

[Ron_McCabe]

An aspect of the software people do not utilize enough is the key word tracking combined with the page grader. If you look at the keyword tracking you may notice a URL on the right hand side to some of the key words.  That is the specific URL that is ranking for that key word. I use this to see what key words I have ranking and then use the page grader to optimize pages for each key word or key word set and make sure that each key word I care about is ranking on a specific URL. just keep going through this process until you are ranking on all the key words you are targeting.

As SEO is a "no one thing" art form you need to fix all the crawl errors on the site as well as build up your domain authority in the background. An aspect people often do not think about on the front end is bounce rate and conversion. Right away I would set up conversion events on the web site itself and tie these to Google Analytics.  I would also add Crzyegg heat mapping software to your pages, While tracking the traffic to your web site look at what that tracking is doing once they are there.  i

[Toddfoster]

For extra credit, you might also consider locating your top competitors and using Analytics to determine what their metrics are like compared to yours as a benchmark for where you stand. It's great to know how well you are doing relative to yourself, but it also helps to know where you stand overall compared to your competition.

[LauraSultan]

Are you tracking conversion goals or events in Analytics at all? If not, you might want to set some up on the old site so you can get some before and after stats. I would also keep an eye on some of the data available through Google Webmaster Tools, such as pages indexed, crawl errors (after re-launch), search queries, and crawl stats.