Is there a way to map your on-page SEO changes with the organic growth?

[_nitman]

Hi Mozzers,

I was just wondering if there's a way we can map our on-page SEO changes with the increase/decrease in organic traffic. For instance, I introduced brand pages' link the product page breadcrumbs and suddenly organic traffic for my brand pages increase from X to 2X in 1 couple of weeks. Now, this can be because of this breadcrumb change purely or because of some algorithm update or may be, bots started finding the content interesting and hence, started ranking them up (in case the brand pages were launched recently).

So, you can't say which change should be mapped to what increase/decrease in organic traffic. Or, is there a way to map this?

[_nitman]

Thank you so much Sir Alan. Really appreciate your reply

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm only going to add to all of these great responses by saying this:

1. Even if you make a change today, it does NOT mean you will be able to know EXACTLY when that change is acknowledged by Google.  This is especially true on larger sites. It can take days, weeks, even months for Google to properly recrawl the entire site (even when they crawl every day, some of those URIs were just crawled the day before or three days ago, while only a portion of today's crawl will be other, not as recently crawled URIs).  And then it can take weeks for all of Google's algorithms to catch up. Along the way, those algorithms may even evaluate only a PARTIAL understanding of the change (while waiting for Googlebot to get to all the other pages).

2. One additional suggestion is to look at in-page analytics within Google Analytics, or a 3rd party click tracking tool to get a better idea of whether people are even clicking on a given link on-page.  Just be careful in setting up 3rd party click tracking - do it poorly, and you can cause massive duplicate URL problems.  And in-page analytics in GA often aggregates all clicks on all of the individual links on a single page where several point to one common destination URI.

[_nitman]

Oh wow! Will connect with you on Twitter to understand about the same which can help me plan it better. Hope you won't mind sharing the way your architected your internal tracking tool

[cbielich]

Yeah I am an Analytic Junkie and I have incorporated my own analytics I built that helps me compare with GA at the same time that helps me dive deeper into the numbers and gives me a more detailed overview of behavior on my pages as well as users.

It's cool

[_nitman]

Hi Linda,

Yeah! High time to start exploring GA annotations. Needless to say, will definitely post here once I'll be able to find/build a good solution for the same

[_nitman]

Hi Cesar Bielich,

Thank you so much for the well descriptive explanation, will start exploring GA annotations right away.

Yes, I can code and planning to work on internal analytics system to track these granular pieces but it'll take time to implement such powerful system when you've 10 million + pages and hence, its not a P0 right now. We have integrated GTM as well, and tracking some of these values to some extent. But, as you correctly mentioned that none of these things can be directly mapped to any increase/decrease in organic traffic, I should definitely think about prioritizing my project to understand the correlation between my changes and the organic traffic which can be an awesome asset to understand these things.

[CB0001]

Hi Nitin,

We found that using Fruition (actually a penalty checker) was pretty useful as well. It overlays all Google updates and SERP changes on your Analytics data. And of course: use annotations in Analytics.

If you figure out a great way to do this, please let me know!

Kind regards,

Linda Hogenes

[MoosaHemani]

Hello Nitin,

Honestly I think there is no one solution fit for all in this situation. Let’s say you tweak your home page title and rankings get up by 2 positions this never means that this is a standard solution and things might not work the same way for other website.

Even if you test one thing at a time to see how your changes are impacting results, you cannot control the environment completely. Let’s say you fix all 404s on your website and panda roll out on similar dates so you cannot exactly say that if this change in result is because of fixing 404 pages or because of the panda update.

I think it’s very difficult to say exactly what is impacting how much on results but you can do some test and come to a point that few factors has a less weight as compare to others within the industry.

Just a thought!

[cbielich]

Well there are a few factors you have to consider with this and unfortunately there is no definitive way to determine this with Google, but with patience, over time you can see the benefits from your changes and track them.

When it comes to algorithmic changes there is practically no way to monitor that. Google has told us time and time again that they make many changes constantly (almost daily and up to 500 to 600 changes a year) to their algorithm to make it smarter so you have to consider that. Tracking changes to on-page SEO with specific algorithmic changes will pretty much be impossible, BUT it's not impossible if you track it correctly. Remember that your users will give you all the information you need to determine if your changes are working, and the more your users are happy the more they will share and spread the news so that will eventually evolve into shares and backlinks.

Tracking on-page SEO changes to organic traffic

This one is simpler than you think as long as you know how to do it correctly. One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics. Here are a few things you can do.

• Google Analytics provides annotations for you to create markers when you make changes on your site. You can then track the changes you made with the annotation and see the difference in traffic.
• Track changes with "compare to" option when selecting dates that help you see the differences in traffic from the previous period. For instance if you made a change on November 1st. Use the compare tool and track the previous week of traffic to that date range and see if you can see an increase in organic traffic.
• You can "compare to" in the same way with more specific setting and see which pages on your site (or ones you made changes to) increased or decreased after you made your changes. Just run the "compare to" scenario the same in Google Analytics, but do it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and see which pages increased in traffic from your on-page changes.

When making these changes remember to use Google Analytics and track specific organic changes in traffic by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium and then click on your search engine of choice (I'm assuming Google of course). Or when tracking other changes use different dimensions and metrics to track the organic traffic.

Can you code?

Depending if you are using wordpress or built your site from scratch knowing how to include some code on your site to track your changes helps tremendously.

For instance you can add some code to help you determine how many users are clicking on your breadcrumbs links and see if that help creates more organic traffic. PHP is great for this. Instead of having the links on your breadcrumbs sending the user to the exact page, have it go to a script that logs that click in a database so that you can see how many users are clicking on your breadcrumbs links and which ones, then send them to the desired page. Over a few weeks you will see which clicks are the most effective.

If you need some help you can private message me here at Moz and I can show you what I mean. I have been a web developer for over 15 years and I am a Analytic junkie so I can show you some things

Hope that helps